The River

Sometimes I can’t account

For all that has passed behind me

For all the hope

For all the bright belief in the goodness of people

In the goodness of myself

For all the time

Stretching backward

Stretching forward

A winding river of loss

On whose one shore is pain

And angst and yearning

And hopeful prayers

And youth’s boiling tears

On whose other shore is silence

And acceptance

And resignation

And the hard-won droplets of him who knows better than to weep

Or to send any more earnest entreaties

Heavenward

Sometimes I can’t account

For the length of my gaze

For the improbable reach of my stare

The days and doings it intimates

None of them yet come

But all of them done anyway

And each one mattering just as little

As every single one before it

All of them ending the same

Sometimes I can’t account

For what I feel

For what I don’t

For the barren bed of that river

For inevitability

For how little moves me

For how little matters

For how little I care

About how little I care

Sometimes I can’t account

For being the way I am

For wanting to want

But knowing I could never love anyone enough

To give them my weekends

Dogs are messy

Children cry

And are so ungrateful

And can be so easily ruined

And then become tiresome

For fewer things are more annoying

Than a ruined child

Except having to feign love for one

Chains I don’t want

Obligations of empathy

And pretending

To care about such endless noise

From everyone

All the time

And tolerating the drone

For the few moments when I don’t want to be by myself

Sometimes I can’t account

For when the old me slipped below the waters

For if a new me will ever come up from the current

For where this river leads

Except the endless leagues before me

As clear as this page

Ten thousand inconsequential days

Killing time

Until the Eternal Night

Sometimes I can’t account

For the passage of this long day

For where I find myself in it

For if it will ever have purpose again