Shrink

I am smaller,
everything diminishing.
Friends reduce like passengers dismounting at their destination.
Over the decades my home, the castle,
 shrivels to a walnut.
As work retreated the circle of acquaintance
Becomes scanty as a dot.
My frame of reference seems sadly bounded
by the edge of the postcard received
from a foreign place. I, who collected titbits
like a black hole!
 
Even my height,
my hearing,
my eyesight
shrink.
This is age,
becoming invisible until
we disappear.
 

Nigel Walker

in anthology The Long and Winding Road, ed. Marlow Peerse Weaver
2012, Dzanc Books