The Task

At least once, let us try to approach the center of the real problems.

I mean the real ones.

Such as why, when you did not ask to be made, we insisted.

As if you will never taste evil, dear child, and know only the grass, the way it sags just before cutting, thick and heavy with dew.

As if that much sufficed.

No—we walk on the roof of Hell, the boards are brittle and thin.

Not only thin, but missing in patches. Suffering flickers, unceasingly there.

You will be tempted to seek your revenge on the world, or demand consolation, or believe that it's all a mistake—that you belong somewhere else:

a city of green leaves, light wind, stars watching us greedily. A stable horizon. All things known.

But rejoice: we are here. So we stand. We go into it, a place which eludes description: good days, bad days, days drifting like smoke through our ravenous arms.

I hold you, but only as much as the sea holds the hull of a ship: always lapping against it, and never discerning much more than an outline, a bright mass with somewhere much farther to go.

Some sea will lie always between us.

Rain falls, and I can hardly believe it.

I promise you, this is not poetry.

A luminous wind fills the mountains and valleys, melting the high snow, and stoking the aspen like pillars of fire.

The swaying maples creak and snore. A blithe hawk doodles on air.

We have so little time.

I don't know if you'll find me again at the end, if there is one, or how soon you'll get to lie down.

All I know is your task is immeasurably great. It cannot be accomplished, yet it cannot be avoided:

persist, little heart. Straighten up, shoulders. Move, legs. Go forward. Bear yourself over the ruinous world.