At the End of the Day

At the End of the Day

It is as if there were a pall
upon my little universe, intruding
since I had gathered it so comfortably,
insisting on the sense of it,
extruded as a past gives way
and hardly anything is lost.

But yet not so,
it glowers at me sometimes;
its familiarity contrived in myth,
in lessons that I learned too late
to save my pride—
its smiles misunderstood,
its irony forgotten on the steps outside.

I have become too old
to barter lassitude for zeal, to trace again
that twisted trail of hope and chance;
I moved on down it, trusting
on a crusty, yet farsighted God
to meet me halfway out.
And there he was, always out of reach.

It's misty on the land out there—
not like it was, and what I gather in
is not the harvest; it is much too strange.
Dying will, I think, turn out to be
not all that much of peace or plenitude,
but puzzlement.
Where did they put away my world?
~