Counterclockwise
2 Minutes Read Time
In the 1979 “counterclockwise” study, eight elderly men were asked to spend a week together at a retreat staged to look, feel, and sound like 1959. The men all “showed dramatic improvements in their hearing, memory, dexterity, appetite, and general well-being.”
Cover me in the blue film of new appliances.
Let me be freshly delivered and undented.
I want to feel the peel again, the satisfying
suck, climaxing to gleam. Or do I? Maybe
I’m finally getting used to memory foam,
the way everyone looks like someone I once
knew, the awkward nakedness of faces,
without place or era. It’s all about context.
Design me a ramshackle rental, with futons
on the floor, fist-holes in the kitchen drywall,
the Ramones on the turntable, and Reagan
our biggest worry. If I can spend five days there
with college friends, my hip will stop throbbing
and with my deaf ear I’ll hear cocaine travel
through a straw down the hall. There are
advantages. When I say softening, I’m not
talking flesh, although that, too, but of opening
to the dull and daily. I’m done with disparaging
the sparrows, resisting repetition, unless, of course,
it’s my husband asking me to repeat myself.
Even the workout video I’ve grunted through
a hundred times—I still smile at the couple’s
banter (even Claudia’s breaking a sweat!).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m as impatient as always
and also—could it be?—more forgiving. Protective
foil long peeled, sure, I miss the moment of reveal
but I’ll settle for steel’s opposite, apply myself
to becoming less solid, the slow dissolve, so
porous—gossip, resentment, envy, words flow
right through me, and whatever song you decide
to sing, I’ll know all the lyrics, will sing along
like my dead mother-in-law, with a split-second
delay, faking the tune a little with such elation.
Read more from Issue 22.1.
