In This Moment

It’s not like you’ve only been writing poems. You’ve had to write

many essays, emails, texts, tweets, and letters to others over the years.

You just can’t write people back anymore. Luckily, you won’t need a procedure

to answer a telegraph with your mind. A thought-gram? Not even with more time.

What if it explodes, you’d say? You’ll stay here, unsafe in the way you’ve known,

by not following the crowd. You can listen to the nasally ways

their indignation sounds in your ears, here, in this bed-without-side-rails of a life.

You can look out the window from the room where you cut poems with pen and paper.

You were a little late getting here, but only like a toddler who discovers that after

you walk, you can run. For most of your life, you were moving sideways, that is writing,

to find the truth of your condition when you weren’t falling on your ass.

That happens a lot in poetry and in life. You move

forward on some feelings or you move forward on some thoughts,

then you keep going until you drop out and escape

with a few sinewy threads, your last connective tissues

from your heart, which now lives in one of your poem’s last lines

or as a story told about you by one of your dear friends who should know better.

Then you’re finally free. Your ass or this life is old. You start crying like a baby.

You look back on it all, but you only remember

a little. Then, if you’re lucky, one of your children

puts one of the books you’ve written in your hand

while another reads one of your poems. A memorable line—

it’s a strong and familiar thread you follow from a full spool of golden

poems. When you wrote it, you must have been reading William Stafford.

It feeds so smoothly, you could die.

Then you close your eyes, while you finally hear others’ sinewy poems,

essays, emails, texts, tweets, letters, or thought threads as their voices tremble

through words that say, “It’s okay. You can go now. We love you.” You stop

your ragged breathing, your body leads the way it is designed to

in this moment. Your last memories unroll. You hear—”What a life. What a soul.”