The Oxygen Mask.(Poem)

 
THE OXYGEN MASK 
 
   "I've lived too long." My father's voice is 
   muffled 
   by the oxygen mask he has to wear for most 
   of the day, just to keep on breathing. When he 
   takes 
   it off, he falls asleep in mid-sentence, and snores 
   terribly while conversation goes on as if 
   he were no longer there. Someone begins to boast 
   on his behalf, while he sleeps, about him winning 
   the fours 
   at the local lawn bowls club, and how it ruffled 
   his young opponents to lose to two fellows stiff 
   with arthritis and years, one with the shakes 
 
   and the other unable to breathe, when he was 
   eighty-five and his partner eighty-nine ... 
   "He's only eighty-seven," interjects a voice 
   from the chair: even in this extremity 
   he is unable to tolerate the slightest 
   error of fact. The last of his hair is fine 
   as that of a new-born; while he sleeps like a baby 
   his face and his polished skull seem to possess 
   a sweetness which always went unnoticed, at 
   least 
   by me, in his prime. Perhaps it was by choice 
 
   that he disguised his looks for most of his days 
   beneath comic hats and thick-rimmed spectacles 
   and moth-holed gardening sweaters; he was told 
   he might have gained promotion ten years sooner, 
   at work, if only he had bought a better suit, 
   but he was never ambitious. Like tentacles, 
   the tubes and power cords climb over the chair; a 
   lunar 
   expedition would take less equipment. He weighs 
   even less than the slender airforce recruit 
   of more than sixty years past, as ...