One of the gifts of age is time. You can slow down, like the wealthy — with a little luck, if you want.

Slow sometimes makes people angry, like when behind an old one at the grocery checkout, or trailing old drivers not in the same hurry that seems to infect everyone else.

Slow Down — a benefit for the retired. Think of that when your foot’s heavy on the accelerator and you’re behind an older one doing 25, taking in the Portland skyline along Back Cove. Not that I’m retired. Most writers, especially poets, don’t often afford leisure treads.

Time — the ultimate gift nonetheless, sacrament even, especially for writers; for our dreamers, for poets, time for noticing small things, like sunlight sliding down the sides of houses.

It doesn’t slide so much as seep, spreading down — oh, so slowly along the gray shingles, not unlike the way a water stain will spread through a tablecloth. Time to notice how it gleams on a metal drainpipe halfway down from the roof gutter, suddenly illuminating a few edges along the frames of windows.

There’s some conversation among neighborhood crows but no birdsong this cold morning, sparrows and maybe a few juncos flashing back and forth past my own window from tree limb to bird feeder to tree limb.

In Africa, there are Bushmen who wait on thatched roofs in dawn light every morning to applaud the sun’s rise.

We say sunrise even though we know better, that it’s us turning toward the sun that first lights rooftops, treetops, slowly washing down along shingles, clapboard and brick, down the trunks of the big maples, the tall pines.

Dark green leaves of a holly light up. Snow in the garden is gleaming and spade-like leaves of cyclamen shine just inside my window. No blossoms.

When my lover — now wife — gave them to me years ago, they were shouting white blossoms, purple stains at their centers, their petals so blousy I thought of white skirts blowing up above young women’s thighs, the way Marilyn Monroe’s teased in that famous pinup of her standing in an updraft.

And, oh, look! the sun now coming through the window, our star, 93 million miles away (they say), lights this page and is about to touch my hand.

Martin Steingesser of Portland is the author of a book of poems, “Brother of Morning.”