Old men don’t care who they talk to, I
don’t know if you’ve ever noticed: they’ll
say to a stranger stepped into the elevator,
so, where are you going today, or
absorbed in a monologue, they’ll turn
suddenly to you as if you’d been there all the
time: these meaningless contorts from the irrelevant
baffle people, or else they just keep their
chins straight ahead as if they’d never been
called on: I want to say, what’s it
to you, you old fiddler twanger: old myself
I look into the panel mirror and wonder if
I just spoke to myself: by that time the
elevator has stopped somewhere: I get off.
-- A. R. Ammons (23 March 1998)
