Robin Chapman

My Lifetime Subscription to the New Yorker Expires

It was a month before I noticed, feeling fine, working hard
on that last double fiction issue each night before sleep—
and if I slipped behind on the campaigns for war
and the presidency, reviews of blockbuster summer movies,
cartoons of cubicled workers and flea-ridden dogs,
it was a gradual falling away from the dinner-table talk,
only brief silence and puzzlement as others took up the reins
of urbane comment and investigative argument — the mail box,
unusually empty, drove me to look at the mailing label,
where it said, plain enough, "expired June 14, 2004,"
releasing a sort of giddy post-mortem thought that now
that this span of my life was over, I was finally caught up.

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Robin Chapman is author of nine collections of poetry, including Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos (with J.C. Sprott's fractal art; World Scientific, 2005), winner of the Posner Poetry Award; The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead (WordTech Editions, 2007); and the co-edited anthology On Retirement: 75 Poems (University of Iowa
Press, 2007; with J. Strasser).