Tumbled

For days, your spirit soars, covers the distances with featherweight strides that seem impossible in the empty depth of winter. You think perhaps you've unearthed some long-harbored secret to survival and wonder if you're too well, now, to complain. 

But then the morning comes with ice picks for alarm clocks, draping boulders across your chest, no explanation, no excuse. Your health insurance company says you are fine, so they will no longer pay for your attempts at climbing out of the chasm. An airplane reels into the Potomac River, you can't remember the last thing someone said something to be happy about.

You're out of milk for your morning coffee. 

There was a time when you thought if you only made it out of your 20s, you could live forever and die when it was time. Saw the impulses of youth claim people who felt like kin, counted days until you aged out of the woods. 

Neglected to see how many of your ilk gave up at 31, at 47, at 62. How the woods do not belong to an age, but to a blood stream, to a temperament, to a destiny. You wanted to be one of them so badly that you forgot to read the fine print. 

When you sign up for sifting through the madness,
you agree to carry the woods
for as long as your legs will hold.