We have come to a threshold, maybe crossed over.
Like gawky newlyweds. We are no longer the people
we once thought we were, which is to say, we are not
nebulous, or promiscuous of spirit, or coruscant
horizons of possibility. We ossify in ways that are
difficult to quantify, settling like river sediment
around an unexpected bend. But were we not delta bound?
Poetry once startled my soul with a mythic timbre,
torrential. Now, just the faintest whisper of a Martian
riverbed; my fissured heart evidence of the possibility
that grace once made a home on these shoals. Our good
looks have not abandoned us, but have softened, the way
a coin slowly abrades with passage from hand to hand to
hand. The gleam of youth has run off into our neighbor’s
pastures to devour his harvest. My heart sometimes
aches after a run. My liver scolds me after a night of
binging. I once moved like a feral angel across the
plains of a baseball diamond.

*

We drink red wine, reasonable portions. The old
gluttonies usurped by memory. We talk of the mutual
friend from college, the legendary drinker everyone
spoke of in reverential tones, the charismatic one,
He Who Made Every Party. What identity does one find
when his entire self has been constructed upon a
foundation of loose tongues and inhibitions? It is
a generational query I find creeping up my sternum
and esophagus like indigestion. How does one find
fulfillment, or intimacy, when we are inundated by
easy pleasure and blithe irresponsibility?
Consumption, of every kind. I worry we have been
disassembled by technology and the free market. We
talk of my brother who will soon be a father. He is
no longer a quiet, sad, sullen boy. Or, he is a sad,
sullen boy trapped in the eviscerated, bloated carapace
of a teetering addict. I spend my life swimming in
words, but in his presence I am beached in silence.
I would like to ask him about his loneliness and his
fear. I would like to tell him that I feel it, too.

We are talking about men building their own coffins,
sipping cheap wine. We are the only two of our old
friends remaining, and this plagues us, implacably,
the way sons are plagued by the successes of their fathers.

*

My father travels the world talking about violence,
and this is, I think, a good thing. He is, despite his
sins and flaws and insecurities - and to vastly simplify
a complexquestion - a good man. He travels the world and
preaches non-violence, and if he hasfrom time to time
failed to adhere his own advice, well, he is only human,
right? Back when I was still an amoeba of a man, he and I
would have long, speculative conversations about God or
love or art. Now we avoid most of these topics because
his knowledge outpaces mine by embarrassing strides,
and precociousness is no longer a fair excuse. We talk
about baseball or basketball, the safe havens. His
disappointment fights a fierce battle with his deep and
unquestionable paternal love. He taught me how to shoot
a basketball with incredible precision. Now, when we play
one-on-one, I find myself easing up so he can acquit himself
admirably, pride intact. I remember being a young boy and
driving with him through the fallow cornfields of central
Indiana to a small church. He was a preacher then. He told
stories. I watched him preach, and I practically burst
with pride at this man everyone listened to, my father.
I wanted to tell stories.

He calls me sometimes and asks me what, exactly, I am
doing with this so-called-life of mine.

*

I read poetry in bed. If I am moved, I walk into the
frozen caldera of deep night and move like a phantom
through the slumbering suburbs. I give thanks for what
abundance I find, even if that abundance is less than it
once was (or possibly the abundance is greater, always
greater, and it is only my appreciation that wizens). I
give thanks for barrenness, too. I try, and fail, to fully
capture the size of the wind. I go for long runs in the
cold, and I feel my heart strain and moan, and sometimes
the fear of death overtakes me so viscerally that the world
seems to come apart at the seams, like I am running through
a Dali painting, and the impermanence of all things makes
me slow to a walk, my hands on my head, my heart screaming,
my body prickling with a thousand different synapses. And
I walk like this, gasping, until things cohere again, and
the terror subsides. Many mornings, I stand naked in my
kitchen and fry garlic and onions and eggs. I write in
front of a large window overlooking the skeleton of a
rhododendron. I write impassioned letters to old lovers,
or almost lovers, or wished-to-be lovers and then I erase
them, the way a Buddhist artist will methodically assemble
sand into a beautiful labyrinth and then let the wind
blow it all harmlessly apart. I sip coffee with a lovely,
pale skinned young woman and cannot believe my good fortune.
I miss the ambitious, youthful conversations with my father.
I become angry over petty things like traffic or sports. I
make love, I masturbate. I waste many, too many, hours. I
think I am mostly grateful in my lonely, finite life.

*

A friend I have not seen in many years tells me, ‘It is
strange to think we were once younger than we are now,
and we will soon be older, and then much older.’ In my
younger days, which have somehow run their course, I cried
often. In the shower over women, in bed over literature.
Over the incessant and unyielding beauty of the world. We
cry, I think, because we believe in things: in love, in art,
in family, in meaning. We ask such impossible questions of
each other, to save us from fear and from loneliness. We hold
such silly passions - sports, literature, breasts - and try
to share them. I cried tonight thinking of my brother. I have
lived in this house for over a year and he hasn’t the faintest
idea where it is. I think, maybe he is driving and watching
the houses pass, and maybe he thinks, ‘Does my brother live
in that one? Or that one?’ I’d like to show him the rooms,
the sun porch where I try to write, the bed room where I
quietly make love. He could listen to the trains that wake
me in the morning. It would be underwhelming; he wouldn’t
say much, and he would leave, and I would smoke a cigarette
and wonder about how my heart used to be, so fragile and
full of curiosity, so susceptible to bouts of tears. Then,
I doubt my brother thinks that at all when he is driving.
He thinks about his girlfriend, or his soon-to-be son, or
whether he can stay clean for another day. The weeks pass,
and we do not talk. The years pass.

*

When we were young boys, we were inseparable. One night,
we were playing football in our living room (the reckless
way boys will disregard danger). I tackled my brother into
a chair and ripped a gash in his head that came within a
half inch of ruining his eye. We laugh, sometimes, recalling
this story. Our father was taking a shit at the time, our
mother at work, our sister not yet born. My brother was a
happy young boy, inquisitive and verbose, full of soluble
laughter. After the trauma, his demeanor changed. He became
the quiet, sullen, sad boy he is still today.

*

And sometimes I cry in the shower at three in the morning
after two glasses of wine with an old friend.

*

The girls I loved are now women married to other men.
I haven’t cried over them in years; I manage happiness
for them. I think that somehow my writing redeems my
failures with them, and with my father. That somehow,
even, it redeems my failures with my brother. I imagine
that sometimes these lost women, or my aging father, my
dying brother, read my poems and my stories and think,
‘Yes, he is a good man.’

I am a storyteller; I tell lies.