Beginning Again

I did not try to hold the years in place.
They moved as years do, indifferent to desire.
A man learns this eventually—
that time does not negotiate.

What he can learn, if he is fortunate,
is another skill:
to walk beside the passing days
as beside a river whose current
cannot be stopped
but can be listened to.

There were years when the world became narrow.
This happens to many people.
Fear reduces the horizon.
The future closes like a gate
handled by unseen hands.

One survives then by small exactitudes:
breath measured carefully,
the body persuaded to continue,
the mind kept from falling inward
like a collapsing house.

Yet something in me resisted this reduction.
It asked for a larger weather.
It asked for sound.

So when most men my age
prefer the known paths
and the reliable chair by the window,
I returned to study.

I entered rooms where light fell patiently
on books and instruments.
Questions hummed there quietly,
as though the walls carried
their own electricity.

In those rooms I listened.

Reeds spoke.
Human throats carried histories
older than the language I had grown up with.
Drums reminded the body
that distance itself can sing.

Slowly I understood
that meaning does not belong
to a single life.

It travels.
It crosses borders like pollen.
It settles where it can.

Trauma had taught me another education:
how long a moment becomes
when terror measures it.

But study restored time to its greater scale.
Centuries returned.
Voices returned.

The future, once closed,
reopened its doors.

Now I stand in my sixty-third year.
Not at an ending.

A man is rarely finished
even when he believes he is.

On Tuesday they will give me a name for what I have done.
Ceremonies have their uses.
People place garments on the body
as if a life were something woven.

But the truer mantle
is invisible.

It is made of persistence,
of listening,
of wounds that did not succeed
in making the heart smaller.

Therefore I will say plainly
what many are reluctant to admit:

joy exists.

A small bright creature lives in the chest
and refuses extinction.

So I praise the mind
that did not surrender its spring.

I praise the life
that began again.

And I praise the widening of the world
which, after suffering contraction,
returned.