Correlations
A diminutive school of old fish
A small pack of elderly beagles
A few arthritic crows
The old men walk the park trail
in T shirts and a straggle of arm-waving
energetic-all-at-once-shouting-over-each-other
big talk. At the parking lot
bag lunches and coolers out of car trunks
they set themselves up at the picnic table
Antique snails
gathered in a circle
on a stone wall
antennae pointed to the center.
7/27/19
8/21/19
Claudia McGill Writes Poetry, Did You Know That? 
I really enjoyed the running them of aging and antiquity in this poem, the way you compare the animal world in the bracketing stanzas with the humans in the central one. You actually have me wondering whether middle aged birds start to complain of aches and pains in their wings or whether elderly fish start to make pained noises when swimming since their bones ache. At least the invertebrate snail cannot suffer a bad back!
Now I am wondering too. I do know one of my previous cats, Raquel, got arthritis so much so that she could not turn and clean her back – I combed it for her instead. She had never liked that in her prime days but in her old age, it set her to purring.
I love the descriptions to open the poem!!
Thank you. There were quite a few familiar groups on the trail before the pandemic when this was written, now things have changed, some people I no longer see, but mostly there are so many more people using it now. And as you might guess, many oldsters who can carry out these descriptions!