Elegy for 39

It was the year we decided not to get divorced. The poem said something like clouds moving quickly across the sun while the rest of us talked about faith and how my personal level of intensity in faking it is one way to measure the depth of the drop I’d have to make before I could turn over in bed toward a window open to the night and spotty rain dotting leaves with light caught from porch lamps and know that what I’d imagined to be time drained of sound was the purest sound, one person turning away from another into a cone formed by his turning. We sat on the porch while the kids napped and watched light rise and fall through clouds moving quickly across the sun like distractions from a vital and complex truth that requires too many pages of exegesis for people with days like ours, time’s version of an optical illusion, both too long and too short for anything like actual thinking. I remember one of the many unsolicited pieces of advice we got when Elmer was coming along—don’t make any major decisions until he’s one, you’ll be too tired to get it right. So naturally we changed jobs and moved across the country. I can’t even remember who gave us that advice. They’re probably out of our lives now. And what’s in them, these six and something years out of your forty and my almost that we’ve been spinning through together, watching our obligations mount around sensations that folded out of us from zones of our beings we hadn’t seen before, like a third arm you’d somehow failed to notice, an us both alien and uncannily us, children, a marriage, an unexpected love— these things have taken over, brushed aside whatever was there before like an anxious developer. This force is of our own making but comically has no regard for us, like that arm is a whole body, two bodies, tugging us along wherever they feel like going, the most dangerous places they can find. I was writing that line on my phone while following fifteen-month-old Harlan doing his duck walk down a wheelchair ramp. He leaned way over the side of it to look at some smooth rocks on the ground and, as I got to the word “dangerous,” toppled down into them. So much for art, some might say, but not me, I just learned how many people have put videos online with the words “spectacular sunset” in their titles, there’s one after another. I’d made one myself, a video I mean, because the sun had ducked behind an unmoving cloud at the horizon, and I knew from the internet how long it would take the sun to reappear in the gap between the bottom edge of the cloud and the top edge of the earth, a sun-sized gap dotted with its own minor cloud variants there to complicate the image, a sun moving slowly behind clouds, and I felt a low note being struck within, something I’ve learned is not sadness but gratitude in unknowing, a feeling that is hard but porous, that dissipates like short rain steaming off its first idea of the ground. Dark pink reformatting the blue, dark pink lights of our forever car, dark pink of hippies, dark pink life tassels, dark pink “to fly,” as you put it, “by the night of our pants.” I don’t know where the night goes, but I know we’ll be awake, and why, this long year of nights when people standing right next to us broke in half and spilled everywhere just because they paid attention. We don’t have an exact date for when we got engaged, there was no moment, no single question but instead weeks of them while an idea changed from something we could do into something we would, it was gestational, like this year has been, a year I hope is over. I’m glad you’re turning forty. I wish I were, too. I need a number for what we’ve come through, our second engagement, longer than the first, permanent, in fact, the questions of questions and the answer we give— give, deny, and give again.