Another Departure

It isn’t much use now
sitting by the same fire,
as if habit could pass for sense.

The room repeats itself.
Chair, table, the small jobs
left half-done on purpose,
all the ways a man learns
to look occupied
while waiting for nothing.

I’ve done enough of that.

What’s left is not youth.
That went off years ago
with other bright mistakes.
Nor ambition, which turns out
to be only another illness
you recover from by aging.

No. Something harder remains.
Not admirable, not kind.
Just the refusal
to finish early
for the sake of comfort.

I’ve lived as most do.
Badly at times,
and then no better for knowing it.
Wanted things. Lost them.
Been taken up, put down.
Moved through places and people
with the usual hope
this might be it.

It never is.
You don’t arrive.
You pass through.

If you’re lucky
you notice this
before you settle too well
into not noticing.

There’s nothing wrong
with the usual life.
Meals, rooms kept in order,
light falling at evening
on things that have lasted.
Decency, even.

But it doesn’t suit everyone.

Not the theatrics of leaving.
Not some late performance
of being young again.
Just answering, quietly,
the same question
that keeps returning:

Will you live what’s left
as if it were already finished?

No.

There are still places
that seem more honest
than these walls.
A harbor at dusk.
A street you barely knew once
and never quite forgot.

And something else, harder to name,
where you stand without excuse
and see what remains of you
when usefulness drops away.

Not happiness.
That word belongs elsewhere.

Something smaller.
Clearer.
A kind of agreement
with yourself
that hasn’t quite failed.

People I’ve loved stay where they are.
There’s no need to spoil that.
Leaving doesn’t cancel it.
Sometimes it’s the only way
to keep it from thinning out
into habit.

Let them have their continuities.
I’ve had mine.
Enough to know
when they stop working.

There’s nothing grand in this.
An old man going somewhere
is just that.
No audience required.

Only the admission
that staying put
can be another way of ending.

Late, yes.
But not finished.

There’s time still
for one more movement,
even if it’s mostly inward,
even if no one sees it,
even if it leads nowhere
in particular.

That isn’t the point.

What matters is choosing it
over the slow drift
into smaller and smaller rooms.

At night the old plans return,
stripped of their noise.
Less convincing, perhaps,
but harder to ignore.

The body complains.
It has its reasons.
Fatigue, small indignities,
the growing list of what you can’t
quite manage anymore.

All true.

Also irrelevant.

If it’s to be done
it should be done properly.
No bitterness.
No speeches.

Just going.

Let the effort show.
Let it be awkward.
Let it be late.

That’s honest enough.

I don’t expect anything from it.
Only this:

not to contradict, at the end,
the difficult part of me
that refused, all along,
to settle for less than living.

If what comes next
is only more of the same
in another place,

even that is better
than the calm, tidy lie
of stopping too soon.

So I’ll go.

Not because it will work.
Because stopping here
wouldn’t.