Things Unseen

Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think they are,
Or maybe they are, or they’re worse.
Seconds pile up in the river against
Broken tree limbs and dead muskrats,
And that’s the way minutes, hours, and eons are made.
That’s life, the way it is.
It’s the ugly truth.
Your children are sweet,
But this does not
Necessitate a future
Free from cocaine, pornography;
Legs lost in foreign lands.
Links, bonds, marriages
Are made and broken. Who remembers? Why?
We all lose sleep — in some measure —
Trying to remember if we are remembered;
If we still matter in some way to this person or that,
Bandaged in the snow.
In the end, just one question:
Is there something more, or nothing more?
It only matters
If you care about the way your cousins
Laughed when you were seven
And wonder if that has made a difference;
If you have watched the leaves turn
Gold, red, orange
And supposed this captured meaning
Beyond apparent logic.
Or, if all else fails,
And the great multitudes of distances
Between darkness and light —
Gradients to some and gulfs to others —
Are unconvincing,
And you should choose to waiver and wager
Trackside in the morning,
Remember that
If you travel north and leave a body
For moose hunters to find
In the spring,
You were worth everything
To somebody
In the moment before the last,
And this singular truth lights great fires
Along narrow pathways
Through the dark woods.