Snowflakes on a Spring Day

It’s April, but the snow is falling and it’s cold

and I have the flu and am drinking tea

wishing not to be alone.

My sickness is deeper than flu,

just enhanced by its presence.

 

Maybe it was because I’d read a sexually-explicit

short story in the afternoon, but last night,

a return from the dead, a long hard kiss

followed by those old daily demands

and I woke up relieved it wasn’t true.

 

The truth is that we rescued each other.

She escaped poverty and uncertainty

and I was saved from myself,

the lone wolf in darkness who,

unable to find food, ate itself up.

 

At dinner last week, I sat at a table with a man

who I’d met last year at a memorial for lost spouses.

We’d shared how hard it was to live without a wife.

Now he’s engaged to be married again.

Life is much easier for some.

 

We aren’t perfect until we are of four legs

and we’re even more perfect when

ten toes are up and ten toes are down.

We weren’t made for perpetual solitude

and I’m not a simile or a metaphor.

 

For awhile it seemed common knowledge

and compassion were going to allow us authenticity

after living so long in pretense and discrimination,

but now the ogre with the orange hair is reversing it.

Nothing in life is fair.

 

Neitzsche wrote that in order to find ourselves

we must examine what we have truly loved,

line them up on the ladder we have been climbing,

for our true selves are not buried within us,

but rise immeasurably high above us.

 

I’ve been climbing that precipice

trying to be someone’s hero again.

We’re born to do what can’t be done.

I want to start my impossible.

Loss is not a passage; it’s an eternal abyss.

 

Life for me has been a paddleboat

slowly cruising long mindless tributaries.

It’ll soon be bogged down in pain and mud

or rocketed to the stars on jet-ski wings.

I try to hold on to hope.

 

Tomorrow’s forecast is for sunshine.

Spring may be coming after all

and my flu will have run its course.

But today my loaded gun is here beside me,

the wolf seeking his revenge.