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Life Studies

by John N. Miller  

“In balance with his life, this death.” - W.B. Yeats

We learn from others. In this school
disguised as a community
for retired elders, I’ve enrolled
as student of advanced mortality,

observing all of us who live in exile
from our younger pasts, and those
refusing to let their life histories
become dead subject matter now, no matter

how soon heart and brain cells fail
their ultimate test. I have seen the slow
painstaking mastery of walkers, the learning
of mechanics so that wheelchairs

keep life moving,
and those who teach me courage ‒
who, uncomplaining, learn by heart
the chemistry of pain and ebbing breath.

I have been taught to mourn and celebrate
at the same time as time, itself
invisible, takes visible effect
upon our bodies, and to honor those

who learn to play
the mournful notes of the recorder
or lend their voices to the singing school
for music-loving seniors

whatever frailties of mind
their flesh is heir to, like those of the aged
woman drifting through our halls,
a song upon her lips

until the night she died.

By John N. Miller

John N. Miller, though born in Ohio, moved to Oahu in 1937, stopping in San Francisco where he celebrated his fourth birthday by walking on the just-completed Golden Gate Bridge.  In 1951 he returned to Ohio to attend his father’s alma mater, Denison University in Granville. Eleven years later, with his doctorate from Stanford almost achieved, he began teaching literature and writing at Denison and vacationing in Hawai’i whenever possible.  He retired from academia in 1997 and now lives with his wife Ilse in a retirement community in Lexington, VA.  Too old now to engage in his favorite pastime, fishing, he devotes himself to writing poetry and short fiction, as well as to his good wife. His email address: