In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

That's Life

T H AT ’ S L I F E It couldn’t be closer than Mars these days. First you’re off on a tangent, then glittering beyond the call in the backyard to no good effect. Later when you shrugged you were blue, I mistook it for “that’s life” not “help me.” I mistake many things in dusk like seeing liberty everywhere today, smallish unacknowledged moments of door holding, tossing coins into a worn paper cup, smiling. To rediscover our neighborhood one wrapper and bum at a time. Where am I going with this? Down to the riverbank to watch the light dazzle and showcase trees in all their prehistoric movement. Two more animals blinking in the breeze. The guest-host relationship is bigger than a house, older 138 than cold planets in space. One of the earliest manuals is about the guest-host thing. Sit down, breathe deeply and welcome yourselves. If you listen you can faintly recall the song. The sweet height of it all breaking free from a canopy of leaves. Remember the day you first took in the night sky? I mean really let it enter and unfold along the interior when the architecture of the body resembles a cauldron for a dying star, twinkle twinkle inside, and inside that a simple hole. So now you know what it is to be sucking air, to be walking upright, to love. Why not enjoy the day, this moment to moment thing, and the furnace above sending you messages: breathe, dummy. Birds do it and the rest of the ark all following the great blank of what’s next. What’s next is courage. To take it all in and feel it for keeps, 139 that persons you meet have a hole too and a twinkle. Embrace them and have a meal. Look straight into their impermanent flash, the nervous-system tic of their talk. Welcome their knowing not knowing their coming and going. 140 ...