Ending
61 Ending God keep me from ever finishing anything. —Melville My favorite first lines come —Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky— despite translation. Living near Dallas I see no starting point. Forgettable scenery stretches like War and Peace in both directions. A hardback, in the middle thousand pages. It is April. I stop screwing up my year on checks and forms and settle down, balancing bloodsugar and checkbook—ways I have to mediate my ever thinking there is no end to this beginning, that one day I’ll wake startled in a sun saffroned by smog, an evening without night. My friend John writes from Gothenburg, Sweden. Light, he says, is the face of God torn away in winter. John’s become ursine. Twenty winters in Minnesota make him pray to anything that gives off heat, light— the television, computer, last pages of books. Brown-black cigarette coronas pock his letter —There’s your midnight sun— as if Sweden turned the world against him. Light, John, is boring a hole right through to you, shaking the end of a stick in your face. Entrenched in your flat, you’re writing a letter to me. It ends like this: 62 Went skating on large lakes glazed with water. Long skates, and I learned to read ice. Three hours to cross, only then we turned back never stopping because stopping feels like sinking and I never did. The sky mirrored in the lake surface and I never stopped. I want to come home. I think of you now as two rivers tighten near my house, grumble old introductions to each other. Each day I see horizons sliced by the sky. Endless days, John, where we begin to notice the darkness, like a hand, pressing down, or holding us, the way we hold a book before closing it. ...
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