glasses

i am twenty five and for the first time i admit aloud that i may need glasses. i look out my truck window in my thirty minutes of quiet during tonight's shift and the trees are indistinct. Every day the reality of my mortality settles on me. there is a sadness in my bones where before, however gripping, it had always been outside me. what is this half-colored time i have come into? i remember a year ago (how horrified i am at the swiftness of the months) sitting in the park on my first visit here - the stoic silence of the tall forest finding that I was outside the drawn-up bridge. racing now swiftly towards the end...i hope to reach some break in the current where i might slow my passage for a time.

the end of winter

this is the end of my first winter. walking out the door my skin braces itself only to find that the cold has gone...my mouth smiles at its passing.

the blue steely siege gives way to the sun. these gray-fingered stalks, these grass's tendrils - are they bones? have they lasted through the frosts, their fingertips the shells of months-dead flowers? Will they live again or are they clinched fists defiant, now triumphant over the long night.

a child turns the stone in his hand and asks "why is it pasty white on this side?" the stone settled in the hollow of my palm like the Eucharist.

inevitably a vulture lands on the far-off cross-beam of some power poles every time i come to this meadow. My eyes strain to watch the silhouette to see if it moves or if it is just some indistinguishable feature of the poles-No there it shifts and adjusts its wings rocking two or three times back and forth as birds do to balance their weight atop their clutching feet. then folding its wings again like a slow sigh...my fingers idly turning the rock between them until i hear it hit the little knot of grass at my feet. I've dropped it, my fingers having apparently become distracted with the bird themselves.

Pretending

Sometimes i have thoughts like these:

for now I can think that I have some strange anonymous importance to every person…but I know one day my skin will sag I will have grandchildren and I will be reduced to being written off by secret narcissists like me. I will be an event one afternoon and people who are free from self-awareness might be haunted by the strange fact that something so seemingly endless as a person can vanish forever from the earth? But I will be gone and there will be green felt on the folding metal chairs. The tent poles have been hammered into the ground for a thousand other dead men like me…it’s a business it’s like a latte…we are a disappearing deceptive triviality passing our days…i can fight it I can deny the sickness when it comes and the fat when it gathers around my midsection my chin when it begins to sag….but I will be just a grandpa a novelty if I’m lucky…I will move to the shoulder while others speed by because the world isn’t mine anymore. One of millions one of millions millions millions who lives and goes away. And the world will not shudder and people will scarcely blink at it…they won’t even blink!
No more lies about me, I will be ashes soon soon I will be forgotten I will breath my last and make room for another to pass his days in turmoil and wonder and vanity. A pebble dropping into a glassy water but making no ripples… My face is melting, my hair is thinning, my knees betray me, my colon stops and my organs find a reason to rot inside me, and a senselessly determined foe claims me while the young ones pretend I’m not there. I’m pretending.