Old Globe
For her big birthday
we gave her (nothing less would do)
the world, which is to say
a globe copyrighted the very year
she was born -- ninety years before.
She held it tenderly, and it was clear
both had come such a long way:
the lovely, dwindled, ever-eager-to-please
woman whose memory had begun to fray
and a planet drawn and redrawn through
endless shifts of aims and loyalties,
and war and war.
Her eye fell at random. "Formosa," she read.
"Now that's pretty. Is it there today?"
A pause. "It is," my brother said,"
though now it's called Taiwan."
She looked apolgetic. 'I sometimes forget . . ."
"Like Sri Lanka," I added. "Which was Ceylon."
And so my brothers and I, globe at hand, began:
which places had seen a change of name
in the last ninety years? Burma, Baluchistan,
Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Transjordan, Tibet.
Because she laughed, we extended our game
into history, mist: Vineland, Persia, Cathay . . .
She was in a middle place --
her fifties -- when photos were first transmitted,
miraculously, from outer space.
Who could believe those men -- in their black noon --
got up like robots, wandering the wild
wastelands of the moon,
and overhead a wholly naked sun
and an Earth so far away
it was less real than this one,
the gift received today --
the globe she'd so tenderly fitted
under her arm, like a child.
Finally, there's cake; nine candles in a ring.
. . . Just so, the past turns distant past,
each rich decade diminishing
to a little stick of wax, rapidly
expiring. I say, "Now make a wish before
you blow them out." She says, "I don't see --"
stops. Then mildly protests: "But they look so nice."
We laugh at her -- and wince when a look of doubt
or fear clouds her face; she needs advice.
Well -- what should anyone wish for
in blowing candles out
but that the light might last?
- Brad Leithauser
