Dogs First

What is it that renders me paralyzed before the not the notion, but the evidence of freedom? Such long hours I've spent in no place particular, thoughts hovering upon substantiation, ideas in their slow revolutions while my hands lay idle. It was thrust upon me in thinking, that the effect of moving so regularly as a child was to modify that old addage, that it reads for my psyche "nothing ventured, nothing lost." A wonder that I may find anything meaningfully efficacious, that love can prove intrepid, enduring through tedium & turmoil. Reft & reft again, asunder from so many fanned flames, you begin to wonder less & less at the trail of smoldering ash in your wake, & instead facilitate clean breaks. Your mind tells you it is so, & your heart's rebuttals, those undying profusions, come to nothing unless you've properly anchored that to which they attend. I used to expect to come to death this way, trembling, cold, my hands grasping nothing where nothing seemed there to grip. A past seems so easily understandable as a parade of ghosts, an arcade in which the thrill & hum of having-been has long subsided, leaving an architecture bare & stark. One can look at a historical site the same way; gaze upon bull run or gettysburg & your eyes reveal loaming grass, wind-blown, & a few skeletal trees. There is nothing in the field to point to what is buried beneath it, nothing overtly & consistently present in a life to point to its past. When my grandmother died, that was it; she left a lonely man in a lonely house, his white hand clutching a white hankerchief. & when he died, we burned what was left of their possessions, razed half of the house, & escorted them into a realm of conjured illusion. They came to me in dreams. I still picture them lodged in a past that was quiet & still, that spoke nothing of glory or the infinite or the dreaming or the dream. Quiet lives, ended in quiet deaths, funerals attended sparsely by strangers. & in spite of it, their lives meant so much, their small dreams, their sheer daily-ness. & here I think I could expire years from now in a dead silence, an insignificant life in my wake. Or I could tender an application or another kind of being altogether. I defer, I defer, & end up a Prufrock. Or I commit, & find myself a day unconcerned with its efficacy. Oblivion in either case, but my erasures in the latter sure & joyous & humble. Such a rich pageant, its trumpets coming clear.