One of the errors espoused by contemporary Americans includes the idea that age is just a number, as if time were a psychological, even a spiritual, rather than a physical reality.  But our bodies do age, and time is in our flesh.  The earth revolves around the sun.  Our hair leaps away from our heads.  Our skin sags where before it was drum-tight.  We were once more elastic not only of mind but of body and spirit.  The organ anatomists call the heart and the spiritual organ the rest of us call the heart aren’t composed of two separate substances.  They are one.  One’s pulse quickens the other’s.
from a discarded post called “On Turning Forty” started and abandoned 12/22/2012

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Like that I was no poet
But what a poet says,
His images: forgetting
The still calm voice
For creation with all
Its faults and flaws

The dark, the light, & in between—
It’s all the soul:
My daughter’s head,
The dirty lot,
Strangers with their strange perfumes,
Names I almost recognize.

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Rue Boyer, Plateau Mont Royale, Monteral, by Max Stablein