emeritus

Used to be we’d leaf through the obituaries, surprised and assured by who went when, counting down from the markers we hold when left behind. Used to be we’d split the paper, reading passages aloud. There’s a gravity to a habit halfway to how to be. There’s a something that awaits the work. The eight to the bar or the old one two, we echo out of range. Taught nothing like that’d learn you, wondering when all the accolades went home on their own. The moment traded in an instant for another round of what might have been. 

Now the words come rushing at you as wait with all your yesterdays, graybeard in the bug light, smoking like a tree struck by lightning. You see the stories as their odometers turn over, the mileage that going nowhere gets. You see the spiders work their beats despite the season’s trend. Stillness sews stillness, the once and future lost. The mark missed and the measure forever. The clerk at the liquor store calls you Chief. Indignant you know exactly how you earned it. Waiting like there was something coming, tending embers in the night.

It’s not as if I shed attachments, it’s not as if I picked my peace. The color of duty and the long walk in the dark. The crowd around helps to heap on the all alone. The work in blurbs and least devils. The barking dog at the heels of folly gathers around the carcass past the fall. The open hands, the emptied appetites, the rituals there to hold high the roof as nature takes the lead. I weigh in to the atmosphere on all manner of confident incompetencies, resting on my laurels of pratfall wounds and scattered ashes. I smoke alone as the hour grows ragged, wondering where I went.