Tuesday, September 19, 2017

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


2 comments:

sage said...

I like the poem and a river has often been my metaphor for life, too. I'm just sad you find too many sad and lonely banks, but keep focused on the current.

Arizaphale said...

Hmmmmm....very interesting. You seem to be berating yourself for your lack of patience and tolerance with things like children and dogs?
Or this an oversimplification?
My experience has been that as you become more tolerant of yourself and your own flaws, you have a lot more time for the people/animals/children around you.
Good luck!