He was middle-aged which <br />means that the mixture of <br />death and life in him was <br />still undetermined. And <br />all of a sudden he took <br />an unwarranted turn—impul- <br />sive, convulsive. As in <br />those nineteenth-century <br />plays where the roof gets <br />blown off the convention- <br />al house and the audience <br />is left to gape at the <br />heroine bareheaded—him. <br />He has a gift for self- <br />serious hyperbole and he <br />resorts to it regularly <br />to describe and explain <br />his behavior. Not that <br />anything happened. But <br />he stared into something, <br />an abyss or a garden, and <br />now in the aftermath he’s <br />more alone than before. <br />He has not been forgiven, <br />not that he wants to be. <br />What he wants is to know <br />what he saw, that it wasn’t <br />theatrics. But that’s <br />hard to achieve, things <br />being what they are, the <br />others implicated being <br />themselves. So he walks <br />in circles and wonders <br />and kicks at the leaves.<br /><br />Jonathan Galassi<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/middle-aged-3/
