I’m turning 40 this year and each year
increases the effort required to be 25.
I pulled a hamstring and felt a spirit
squeeze between the muscle and bone.
Effort begins to require more
effort. I’m good
is what I say when people
who don’t know me
ask how I am. Being good
is how one has manners. I need
a book called how to help someone
beyond cooking. How to cook someone
beyond helping—that’s what I used to do
on a court. When anyone a decade younger
than you calls themselves old, the urge is
to vomit. The urge is to not look
your age.
*
There’s a freedom of coolness
beyond coolness, which arrives
on my mother’s shoulders, who is herself,
nothing more. Her incipient hump,
her stubborn resistance to assistance.
How long she’s been watching the sparrow
of her mind migrate south in silence.
What we see now: the dropping of keys,
of words, of her body to pavement
at the bottom of a flight of stairs.
This isn’t the beginning of disease.
This is the end of pretending.
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