December Fifteen - A Confession

by Justin Adams

  

Admittedly, most of what I know

and what I think I know

has come to me by books or through screens,

all of which have left a sense of should and ought 

which constrains experience 

to a set of desires and assumptions,

ways of seeing (and of not seeing) 

and of interpreting 

(and not interpreting) only useful

in reassuring myself that I do, in fact, know

by the tricks I have mastered.

And for a time it has seemed reasonable

that the recurring advent of seasons,

the cycles of nature, and observing

lives more dependent upon earthlier gods, 

might serve in my own life as foreshadowing elements, 

much like Romeo's speaking in persistently deathly imagery

or the etymology of the name Abel.

Too long have I pondered a sycamore tree

reaching over streams and bending

upward to fill its own gap in the canopy,

naively asking Why? How is it? What does it mean?

It means nothing. It is no sign, no prophesy

to brace me for any happiness or sorrow

yet to come. No more than a tree

and no less, it stands and lives

only as long as it happens to stand and live.

If in some way I divine sickness coming,

will I not, in its expectation, become sick

even when it does not come?

And will I not despair when forecasted peace

and peace upon peace never arrives

in its foreseen form? Certainly. And certainly,

joy and pain are coming, and are here now. 

But of departures and arrivals, who can say? 

Even the past is not fully known, 

for it was neither seen nor experienced in its entirety.

Sight being limited to its narrowness of focus,

a good man was killed for his unexpectedness.

Knowing the coming good, other men gladly 

and assuredly executed the present good,

citing the comfortable sufficiency of their own readings.

So, I will now go without such comfort,

letting go of other men's hopes.

And here still, weightier things remain despite past evils, 

regardless of future joys. Here is present.












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