"Golden years" is the phrase you find on retirement cards, and Dave Bonta uses it as a title only to take it apart in eight short lines. Nothing in the poem is golden. What it gives us is a green, watery image of early summer and then an old man's unsentimental inventory of his own body, ending with a dinner that is nothing but air.
The opening couplet is the only part that looks outward: "the first cherries off the tree / gather in the green water." The poem doesn't say where the water is. It could be a bowl in a kitchen or a pond under the branches, and the ambiguity is useful. What matters is the contrast. "First" implies a season just beginning, while the speaker is clearly near the end of his. The colours also work against the title. The poem's only named colour is green, the colour of newness, and the cherries are implied rather than painted. The verb "gather" gives them a faint human air, as if they were a small crowd assembling, perhaps for an occasion we don't yet understand.
The second and third couplets turn inward, and the tone shifts to something close to a vow: "I am resolved to understand / my old body." The word "old" is blunt, with no cushioning euphemism. What the speaker means to understand turns out to be unflattering. There are "the eyes that corrupt me yet," where "yet" can mean both "still, even now" and "so far." Desire, it seems, has not retired along with the rest of him. There is also "the way I serve my stomach." The speaker is a servant to his own appetite, and the verb reverses the usual relation between person and body. The body is no longer a house he lives in but a master he waits on. "Corrupt" has a moral, almost churchly weight, so these ordinary habits of looking and eating sound like old sins that have outlasted the energy to enjoy them.
The final couplet brings the pieces together: "eating a dinner of wind / for an empty urn." Judging by the imagery, "a dinner of wind" suggests feeding on something with no substance, an echo of the old idea that chasing vain things is like chasing the wind. The word "for" is the interesting one, because it can mean "in place of" or "on behalf of." Is the speaker eating wind instead of a real meal, or offering a meal to an urn that cannot eat? Either way, the urn is empty, and it points toward death and a vessel that waits to be filled. The appetite the stomach demands and the eyes crave is set against an emptiness that will not be satisfied.
The form is plain and quiet. There are four unrhymed couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters, so the poem seems to drift from one thought to the next. The lines hover around seven or eight syllables, a loose steadiness that keeps the voice conversational. Two of the second lines break the pattern: "my old body" is only four syllables and "for an empty urn" only five. Each short line lands like a full stop the poem refuses to print. The sound is also carefully managed. "Gather in the green" repeats its hard g, giving the opening a soft, gathering motion, while "serve my stomach" hisses with s sounds, and the last line ends on "urn," a closed, hollow vowel that suits its meaning.
The poem matters because it doesn't take the easy ways out. It doesn't mourn lost youth in grand terms, and it doesn't console us with wisdom or serenity. Instead it holds up one fresh image, the cherries, against a clear-eyed look at what age actually involves: the body's habits, the mind's stubborn wants, and the knowledge of where it all ends. The title's cheerful phrase ends up sounding ironic, but not bitter. The speaker's resolve "to understand" is itself a kind of dignity, and in a poem this small it is the one thing that is not empty.