Musings

#63
for my daddy

Titles should be for later;
once all has been said and done,
after the curtain has fallen upon the last act.
How can judgment be passed on that which
is still in progress? How do I proceed?
To know the future isn't a power
of man -- God's eyes only touch upon
its intangible domain, and therefore only
God can say who we will be
when this race has been run to its completion.
Endings tell the tales -- what ends well
must have been well.

But that's not true.

The people walk and talk but do not hear;
the children watch and wait, but nothing happens.

The ending tells a story, less than what
the beginning knows, but at the same time it is
hard to know only from
the end what the whole story
said. Endings can't tell all. There's something about
the middles of our lives, the places in between the start and
end. I am not my endpoints: I am
a line -- I do connect two places, my birth and now,
but the connection is still being forged,
I am still living
the link is stretching,
until at last it will snap into place
and I will die.
But that death is not me: I am
the trajectory connecting A to B,
the modulations and extrema of that curve.

The people walk and talk and hear, but do not listen.
The children watch and see that they are nowhere.

I am more even than just a graph,
more than green lines across a darkened screen,
more than the beating of my heart,
more than breath,
no simple line. Maybe
I'm a polar equation, or parametric even, except I doubt
these are the case; my life
would make more sense if it was
written in a language I understood.
But while I speak in words, and think
in sentences which linger on
into my mental midnight, why is it,
then, that I must live
in numbers?

I scorn at the convention (wherever
it may be) which says that I may not
have knowledge of now without
thinking of the end.
What is an end, and why must we have them?
Where are my ends, and where shall I find them?
And, really, does it all matter? Do I need
a title? What's in a name is not
what's in a man; a rose is scent and texture,
the softness of petals up against the
edges of thorns; pinned
but not confined. I am what I am, not
what I am called; I spurn
the titles which impose upon my life, and instead try
to live a life unlabeled, except as maybe
something worth it. (When I find it.)

All I can say to this
is that my death shall be no parenthesis.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A poem such as this possibly requires an explanation. It's the cause of many different effects, as different as "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Shakespeare and e e cummings and math class and wanting to figure out just where I was when I was writing this. Mostly, I think, it was the last one -- me trying to figure out where I am. Because that's something I don't always know for sure, something that requires discovering.

My father always says that someday he'll write a book and call it Number Sixty-Three, no matter what the book's about. And he says that he'll skip page 63 in the numbering, or just leave it blank; and there will be no Chapter 63, though there may be 62 and 64. So that's where the title for this comes from, and I think it fits. It's something meaningless, something ordinary. A title's not what you're meant to get out of it -- it was about finding myself without labeling myself.

I think it worked...but it's too soon to tell.