--- A N D R E W   E P S T E I N

The likelihood of your passage through is infinitesimal.
One morning you wake up and all around your head
are dials and wings and things you must have conjured.
The last way your neck felt in the black dawn forgotten as
your eyes open up and become mine, staring out at the newsy day.
All poetry is elegy.

He flat-out refuses to let the thimble of regrets he suffers beneath cause
any more suffering.  He resolved to stop barking only to continue,
each yelp puncturing the early night's sentence like a stuck parenthesis key.

I am fortunate that my life makes me happy.
That illusion sustains me as raisins dotting a cereal make it 
better, and in a way, more alive.
Younger still than all the architecture we get going slowly,
will arrive just as the elders have slipped away leaving
us their ideas stretched along the clouds of a library stack
and the printing presses sending out new roots like occasional crocuses.
I don't want to avoid who I am at the exact same time
something tells me I must
I wish I knew a crowd of voices to ply,
the author said on TV the other night
the sole purpose in writing in the first 
place is to get out of one's skin, to escape from the 
me I know and shove.
Bend fact, sigh fiction.

Another vagabond panoply is now preparing to unfold.
Under the flank of a weekday morning, I choke back worry about 
where this bus I boarded will stop, and if the destination will be
commensurate with the length and variety of the ride.
My estimation of my own worth ventilated by doubt, the
way through to where it matters that I continue doing what I
get up early every day and do seems to recede in a welter of fluttery happenings
that occur when chance keeps flirting with destiny 
until an impatient bartender cuts them both off.
The apple-sharp air to come may have something pivotal to add.

Or it remains possible that there will never be a clear-cut reply, and that
one day of aimless motion will turn to two, then three, and suddenly I'm
in a chair at the dentist's office in a different century and all this seems like a flat fable.
It may ultimately be determined that all my efforts were a sagging bag,
a clot shooting towards a closing artery.  Imagine if the whole tray of tools is
wrong, a scalpel for a pencil, or vice versa, a pyramid inverted,
the path you thought charged forward joining the road you came from far behind.

A charming view of the Bargain Bazaar, silhouettes exchanging
pleasantries framed by the door's bright light and everyone passing: just dusk.
So much falls between our hands when we meet.
A brief walk today felt like scenes in a documentary about human sadness --

there a man alone in empty playground, head in hands, glimpsed
through gaps in chain link fence in glints of sun
a warped mouth breaks into grimace on an ugly face
the long tree shadows cut across the green at only three o'clock
a stuck air of cigarettes in the foyer where a guy waits 
endlessly for some event or for a buzzer to let him proceed,

so much waiting falls between the lacks the day creates as it goes,
the tilt of afternoon towards an evening that remains 
potential just so long as it doesn't appear, impossible until it is 
suddenly beyond me and then so very possible it is over.