|
Crisis upon
crisis, boulder-sized stacks of them,
teeter before him,
and there’s no room to circle. The only way
is to learn to walk sideways, the body held sideways,
while advancing as straight ahead as possible,
like a fencer, a dancer coming out of a slow twirl,
or someone shouldering a path between stage curtains,
each crisis about to fall, each shame, each heavy sin
casting weird shadows on his face as he eases himself
carefully through. Or it’s library bookshelves,
the slender corridors deep in dark crowded stacks
where he’s almost lost. Should he look back,
he can see his whole life and everyone else’s
as a series of narrow turns and daily escapes
from Death and its brothers: that plane crash
almost his; that incurable disease that flashed
just to his right; the leg cramp only minutes
after he’d reached shore. Can he still somehow fit
between those outcroppings? Will that ledge
hold as he squeezes across it? This rock bulge?
That stone tremble? For a while longer,
statistics say. For just a few steps longer. . . .
| |
|
