A Reckoning

A Reckoning

life broke ten whipstocks

Over my back, broke faith, stole hope,

Before I denounced the covenant of courage.

                                                                Robinson Jeffers

                                                                Suicide’s Stone

Maybe lately, two years before you turn

eighty, the way you take in the day

makes what in yesterdays would weigh

barely anything bear down nearly deadly today,

the way any newly poured crude

sinks in and oozes its gloss covering

on the wings of ducks, in the lungs

of seals who all can’t get out of

the accidental or purposed opening

when the ship runs aground.  Maybe age

is seeing it all come for us and finally

(while in days gone by we’d’ve hauled

what-all to the protective tall grass off

in the smallest dune in the cove) let it all

fall and the weight of it, while it can’t

be shrugged, while it bears down

and sinks us, can, in this kind of hell,

give us some atonement, something of

what we’ve been walking toward

all along, before it all started falling

into the bottom of a small boat

about to get the battering of its life

and hold up as best as it can

the bashing on all sides and ends

the pulling it out of the tide when

the wind sighs and heads off, the rain

makes to withdraw, and the sky has wiped

life clean enough of blight it's both 

frightening and again and again survivable.