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31 Ode to Leonard Cohen and Yogi Berra The dog digs just perceptibly deeper for his leap from sofa to chair. But he’s fit, and with luck we’ll circle the edges of our woods a few more years. At night I think of him gone, the presence of his absence forever and my dimmed memory, my shell hardened around larger and larger emptiness. I live in horror or my parents’ deaths, either sudden loss or the slow diminishment. How will I ever enjoy the world without them? I fear the day commitments— I can’t name these, but they rattle their baby-blue shackles in my dreams— won’t let me travel or luxuriate in leisure, wrestle the work required or drink cold beer on afternoons fighting the lawn, and I’m utterly terrified of the day I realize drinking is no longer a choice but rather, with surety, an addiction I can’t control. I don’t anticipate with pleasure my body wearing at the seams, complacency about success and money, being so cynical with sex I hardly want to play. Like everyone, I recognize the price of the future, exacted regardless. At least I’ll be rich enough and famous, whole and wise enough that that place will compensate accumulated losses. But I know this projection is romance, my aged self peering stony and dark-eyed into middle distances. That today, in this precise April moment, any fool can see I possess absolutely everything I dread losing: hearty dog, healthy parents, 32 woman I love, French vacation, enough praise to stay hungry, lusty things to eat and drink, a house in the country. I should be happy, even delirious, because to miss a miracle by squinting past it is worse than wasteful, it’s plain stupid. My mind knows the compromises, that I should grin like my sweet mutt at the bony fingers in the black robe smoothing the sheet. Laugh and raise a toast. So why then does the day go dark and the screen rattle like a threat? Why do clouds get punched again over sky— oh where is that fleshy heat that only this morning stroked our faces?— and disreputable cedars waver so tall? Why, indeed, does the whole natural world bend to a question I’ve no earthly chance of answering right? Just as suddenly, sunlight returns. But the future, I’ve been there, and it’s not what it used to be. It’s murder. ...

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