Every Turning

Every turning toward is a turning away:

poets have always known the truth

of this. I read

my book because

time in my home is senseless and

unbearable. I shower so as not

to have to face

the inevitable

crackling of my focus when I read,

and I binge-watch The Blacklist

to forestall the

interminable

chore post-shower of drying

my desperate and overgrown

hair, having also

forestalled

my annual haircut, which I refuse

to attend to daily because

I am handsome

if I avoid

the mirror. But of course none

of this is what I am truly

avoiding. Death

is shorthand

for Death, for life’s uncountable

endings and its ultra-vivid

catalog of things

undone, hopes

unfulfilled, opportunities unnoticed so

untaken. I could cite lips not kissed

or kissed once and never again;

high school nights

spent grieving high school nights—they stick

in the heart like sharp bones,

clog the way like

artery-fat;

instruments never learned—my dream

of playing piano is already

impossible, as is

my wise plan never

to fall prey to credit card debt.

But, obviously, I mean something

deeper, an avoidance

more futile and

tragic, so primary and unnameable

I shall be forced to talk around it

—say everything but—

all my droning, hasty

years: not death but what it surrounds,

this one life that is all that I am,

prize I fail

to value

because I mistake it for a consolation against

the sting of some other, greater loss.

Birdsong, sunset, music unfolding

in and out of time,

the taste of chocolate blossoming so generously

across my tongue, my daughter laughing,

my sighing son,

warming winter air,

waking unworried from a weird, good dream,

thousands of orgasms, tongue and thigh

and arch, a clean room,

alphabetized

books on shelf after happy shelf, drunkenness,

sleep, crying out and crying over

my pain, my wondrous

pain.