POEM · FREEDOM AND VIGILANCE
Jenny asked what I wanted. Impact? Money? Power? Freedom, I thought— and there was a field. Late summer. Grass paling at the tips. A road disappearing through it without asking where I had been or what I intended to become. A car with the windows down. Mahler, perhaps, or a woman singing as if the throat had found a way out of the body. For years I wanted the secret. The thing beneath the thing. The door behind the door. Gnosis. Whatever the mystics returned carrying. I hope you find it. I stopped looking. Mine keeps arriving as ordinary things: a train moving north while rain troubles the glass, a museum before the rooms fill, black dirt under my fingernails, someone setting a problem before me in pieces— a marriage, a business, a machine, a life that will not quite work— and listening long enough for its shape to appear. I build systems because once there was only weather. A room could change pressure because a man entered it. A hand could become a fist. Tuesday could arrive on Sunday. So I learned exits. I learned contingency. The slight alteration in a voice before anger became an event. My father has been dead nineteen years. The body has not received the news. It keeps its little calendars of danger. It startles at doors, at silence, at love withdrawing half an inch. Father— what terrible grammar inheritance requires. I know how to take a punch. I would have preferred the piano. Still, I kept moving. Work. Mortgage. Meetings. Dinner. The long republic of Have You Seen That Show. Monday morning, our little proofs of peace: Where did you eat. What did you do. How was the hotel. Did you have fun. Fine. Lovely. No one is wrong. We are animals making small talk beside the enormous fact. Still, some animal in me stands at the edge of the interstate watching the exits flash by. I want a Tuesday with no use. A train whose destination I have not made productive. I want to lie beneath a tree with my shoes beside me, my feet tired because I walked farther than I needed to. I want the cold creek to take the heat from my back. I want October to spend the inheritance differently— gold, rust, blood-orange— until the leaves come down without instruction and cover my coat, my hands, my open mouth. Do not wake me yet. The afternoon is enormous. Somewhere a road keeps going after I can no longer see it. Somewhere the music reaches the movement where everything we mistook for separate returns. Perhaps there was never a secret. Only this world, given enough time to become beloved— and the grief that even forever, so beautifully arranged, seems short.