GROWING OLD IN THE SOUTH

It’s true, you get so dumb and bald
that young folks try disowning you
(and soon the old folks also keep away),
so violently ornery that news has no effect,
inoculated as you are to fact
by narrative that’s more compelling than the truth:
you move to Florida. You vote against school funding.
The nights before you go to church,
you set your best clothes out,
you fix the hairs on your toupee with hairspray.
It’s not that you can’t see the jowls,
how gravity has loosened them 
into an unremitting grimace—but—
it’s hard to clock the aging day by day.
You carry in your head a florid image
of muscled youth, the time you played
guitar for swooning girls out on the pier,
but passers-by remark upon your gray,
the hairs inside your ears, the coming stench
of surrender, which perfumes you, smells 
like apples too long in a grove, like sandalwood 
but sour, the same smell as money 
when it changes hands too many times, 
the bills worn out, the coin impossibly tarnished.