Another Departure

It is not useful now
to sit by the familiar fire
as though habit were enough.

The room is known to me.
The chair, the table, the small unfinished tasks,
the gestures by which a man
disguises from himself
that he is waiting.

I have waited long enough.

There remains in me, despite the years,
something unpersuaded by comfort.
Not youth, certainly.
That has gone where other bright things go.
Not ambition either,
which age exposes as a fever of its own kind.
But something sterner,
less flattering and more faithful:

the refusal to end
before ending.

I have lived, as many have lived,
in error, in desire, in attachment.
I have been admired and forgotten,
welcomed, dismissed, returned to, left.
I have built what I could.
I have lost more than I foresaw.
I have crossed through cities and affections
believing, each time,
that now I had arrived.

But one does not arrive.
One passes through.

And if one is fortunate,
one learns at least this much
before the body grows too cautious:
that dignity is not in remaining
where one is no longer alive,
but in knowing when to go.

The domestic hours have their virtues.
I do not mock them.
There is decency in routine,
in shared bread,
in the well-kept room,
in evening light falling
upon objects that have served us faithfully.

But for some of us
there remains also another obligation.

Not to scandal,
not to grand gestures,
not to the vanity of beginning again
as though one were still thirty,
still exempt from consequence.

No.

Only to answer, if one still can,
that inward summons
which returns at intervals
and asks, without pity:
Will you live the little that remains
as if it were already over?

I cannot.

There are still places
that call to me more honestly
than these accustomed walls.
Harbors at dusk.
Foreign streets.
A shore entered briefly years ago
which has never ceased
to exert its claim.
And beyond place itself,
that other territory,
more difficult to describe,
where the self is tested
not by acclaim or usefulness
but by freedom.

I do not mean happiness.
At my age one should speak carefully.
Happiness is a word for the young
and for advertisers.

I mean instead
the old, severe satisfactions:
clarity, risk, proportion,
the knowledge of still possessing
some undivided consent within oneself.

There are those I have loved.
I do not renounce them.
Love does not require enclosure.
Sometimes it asks, more painfully,
for blessing and departure.
To release what one cannot accompany
is not failure.
It is one of the last disciplines.

So let them remain
with their hearths,
their necessary contentments,
their chosen continuities.
I do not speak against them.
But their path is no longer mine.

And if I go now,
it will not be in triumph.
Let us not become ridiculous.
An old man setting forth
is not an epic figure.
He is simply an old man
who has understood too late
that stagnation also is a form of death.

Yet late is not never.

There is still time
for one more voyage
even if only inwardly undertaken,
even if no one notices,
even if the sea is crossed
with diminished strength
and no promise of arrival.

What matters is not success.
Success is for careers.
What matters is movement
chosen consciously
against the inertia of fear.

At night I still feel
the pressure of those former dreams,
not as illusions entirely,
but as unfinished instructions.
They visit me less flamboyantly now.
Age improves even longing
by depriving it of rhetoric.

I know the body’s limits.
I know fatigue.
I know the humiliation of needing
more than one once needed.
I know that each departure
may be the final one.

Precisely for that reason
it must be made well.

Not in bitterness.
Not in complaint.
Not with accusations
toward those who did not come,
or did not stay,
or could not understand.

But with composure.
With whatever grace is still available.
With a little courage, if possible.

Let the oars creak.
Let the weather turn.
Let the stars appear gradually
over the dark water.

I ask for nothing heroic now.
Only this:
that I not betray,
in the last chapter,
the ardent and difficult heart
that brought me here.

And if beyond these familiar bars
there is only more uncertainty,
more distance, more night,
still that is preferable
to the false peace
of having surrendered too soon.

So I will go.

Not because I am certain.
Because I am not yet finished.