Family Newsletter

Why should it come as a surprise? That the days
End up being mostly cliché, endless expanses
Of glaring whiteness waiting hopefully
To be filled with everything you never had, but somehow
Can't have anymore -- even though lately
You've been doing everything "right," or at least
Have remained so motionless
Relative to the rest of the world that your sins
Could only be those of omission.

So why even bother to go through with it?
The bridges all incinerated behind you, the forward path
Uncertain at worst, at best probably more of the same:
Occasional moments of clarity and feeling surrounded
On three sides by slick, black water stretched tight to
A flat horizon.

Still, it's not exactly an occasion for sorrow, is it?
Finding yourself at the end of your own particular world
Is exactly where you wanted to be, here
On this peninsula of dull pain you have finally
Reached the solution to the first half of your life.
You may now go on to the essay question,
Which fortunately for you has always been a snap.

After all, what better place for your ship to finally
Come in than on the very edge of life? Your
vision un-obscured except to landward, where
Row after row of gray hills cradle the morning fog until the sun
Is at its height -- or sometimes even longer, late into the afternoon.
Therefore, you wait, weighing the alternatives:
The golden messenger gliding on winged feet over the water,
Or the dark carriage emerging from the grimy foothills
To bear you unwilling away to destinations all the more
Fearsome for being known -- the cluttered apartment, the bench
Outside the coffee shop, the enduring silence
Of confusion stunned beyond regret.

Little wonder you always turn to the sea, scanning the glassy surface
For signs of life, though keeping an almost too-respectful
Distance, breathless with the image of being drawn
Into that gigantic mirror, disappearing without evidence
Of ever having gotten this far: the almost irresistible
Compulsion of the acrophobic, the second between jumping
And falling where flight is possible, borne up by fictions of
Holidays past -- the lives joined with yours over time and space,
The maple, split by freak lightning, bleeding sweetness
And profit onto the snowy ground.