The graduates
have learned to split atoms
and whisk paint
brushes over fossilized bones
or maybe analyze
why Napoleon was so paranoid and short.
Careers aside,
the know they must cross the stage
as if walking
the plank or crossing an ocean or bridge
that may or may
not be the one too far.
The girlfriend
has moved out of a shared apartment
to be with the
minimalist who owns a loft in Soho.
The boyfriend
isn’t surprised because she was always partial
to menstrual
moons and the Utne Reader.
The artist paints
in squiggles and makes love tepidly,
but she feels
the need to load the freight elevator with IKEA,
and after all,
Mercury is in retrograde,
or so says her
astrologer, who claims the sky is always moving on.
The empty nest
is just straw and a limp Star Wars poster,
so parents make
a sewing room, a music room, an anything room
because the kids
can flop on the couch over Thanksgiving
when they visit
looking like stunt doubles from a Seth Rogen film.
And who knew
what a bifurcated divorce was,
or the modern hieroglyphics
of custody and alimony?
But the downtown
suits, the sharks with serrated diplomas
insist that the
heart cannot endure entropy,
that the fifth
decade is usually when these things
tend to go down
and suburban lawns are rolled into rugs.
And yet the
couple setting their golden anniversary on fire
with panache has
decided that they must buy a yacht
and sail for the
cape down south after the cabinet below decks
has been loaded
with liquor and a copy of the Kama Sutra.
Have you heard
that Henry’s daughter has enrolled her father
in assisted
living with yoga, origami, and speed dating?
Henry was the
exception to the rule, was a paperweight of sorts,
but his daughter
just cut her hair short because she turned thirty.
She told the
afternoon wine and bridge club that the decades
won’t tolerate
the possibility of loneliness or a broken hip.
“It’s a stepping
stone,” she said, “and there’s no time like the present
to get our ducks
in a row before they get crazy and fly,
or worse yet,
get ambushed by the reaper in the blind.”
And so it goes,
and then it goes some more.
It is afternoon,
and I look at my leather skin and bones
in a mirror that
has never witnessed yoga or origami
in its
all-seeing eye of glass above the mahogany bureau.
I’m pretty
satisfied. I’ve survived the trend to find trends
but know that
before too long I will have to be seated,
unbutton my
skin, remove and fold it, place it in a pine box,
and make peace
with the sun falling over the horizon,
a hint rendered
in whispers of the need to move on.
~William Hammett
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