A Drive to Live

Seventy is the sum of our years,
Or eighty, if we are strong
~ Psalm 90

Now I know how Death’s closer than it appears
By looking in my life’s rear-view mirror; or, to be
A bit clearer, is far nearer to me than it appears
From here, where, if sometimes sitting in weary
Sight of it, still oftener I stand and stare out at it
As if it’s yet endless years off: not less than never.
Well, so it seems when we’re lost in every scene,
And, soon or late, is seen anyway as the one exit
We never mean to take on our way to anywhere.

Today, looking back at all the past that’s never that,
Over a long road I’ve gone one-slow-mile-at-a-time
(My memory- or odometer-in-me- making me wonder
How does goes so fast that so much is now’s as was),
I saw it’s brought me not to where I thought or sought
To have gone, but only to where it ought to have done.

The losing-all is as close, for all I know, as the next moment,
Though, like most those at, or long past, midlife’s milepost
(Of forty, though that was even when I lost my mom at ten,
Momentous event for what it would present, what prevent),
I don’t go by averages of age, but hope by the time I’m seventy
Some pill will have me outlive Methuselah by at least a year…
Still, I can tell I’ll need no end of endurance till Death’s bell tolls.

I recall the care, all of the oil (extra-virgin olive) I’ve swallowed,
Eating near the soil, the healthy toil, bad habits taking little toll,
All my dying to live like Death alone was to be hated and feared
(All the while thinking less of the Soul, as if it’s living forever
Were the reason not to take the least detour to not see it lost
Forever), and count on whatever else tells in favor of long life.
A lover in marriage is a giver of age as good as five fruits-a-day;
It’s missing this misgives me as a bad liver or much bad living.

I know now where I go is the mere continuation of where I’ve been…
I’ve lived- while-in-a-white-line-trance- to eclipse half Life’s distance;
I’ve in me some drive- ever-even-one-more-mile- I’d die (not) to outlive.
Keeping to my state’s limits (hoping to go past seventy only in time),
Never veering, keeping between life’s lines, maybe I’ve even been
Going the wrong way along a one-way, one lane road all this time.

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