Failures in action from the start, as though
they were deliberate, and at
some point they must’ve become so.
Some rules of thumb
for celestial navigation, yes,
that were interesting, intriguing even,
it wasn’t clear how they
worked, what cosmology they
ultimately resided in.
But on a clear moonless night it was impressive,
the way he knew where he was
and where to go
and could do the
same for you, though you had to ask
and often more than once.
But as finally the sum total
and outcome of a life it fell far short
of others, and of what he might’ve made
out of what he had
at the start.
What he was given to care for.
What in a sense he was
a custodian of.
One felt it was all a game
but then also not,
you hoped for mystery, in meeting him,
(there were rumours)
and got something just that little
short of it.
The authority he’d earned
in certain realms was also nothing
you’d want to steer a life
or a country by,
really just tricks, sleight of
hand, endless deflection.
The cottage and the setting around it of course
were beautiful, but again he’d hardly
made them, the landscape
millennia in the making, the cottage
a hundred years old.
It all preceded him.
He didn’t talk much but then he could talk for hours
about the same few topics:
The Tour de France, say,
or Thoreau at his pond.
Not that he was a practical man like Thoreau.
Meanwhile dogs enraged him if they didn’t listen,
if for example they ran away
when he called them. Decades on the planet
and small things like that
he hadn’t fixed, hadn’t even come to
understand about himself.
You wished perhaps, though you didn’t say it,
that he’d really been some terrible man
with a terrible half-hidden
history, and surely he wished
it too; that children were warned about,
that women touched themselves thinking of,
but he wasn’t, and brooded
in his stone cottage
over nothing really, nothing important,
far from his full strong worst,
yet somehow compelling others
without fail
ceaselessly to find and redeem him,
for reasons as unclear to them as to him.
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