Watching your parents grow older was only the hardest thing you ever did.
Now, you wear this mask of age pretending to know something more.
But you know less now—forgetting more along the way—than you did before.
You were stronger then. Sleep could be missed. The day was always young.
Hard to say now just what I have to say for myself. I was never as brilliant as Mamet.
Always too slow of thought and tongue. Never as mad as Pynchon or facile as King.
But my heroes were always authors. The artful writer, not the brave soldier or knight.
And matters of actual life and death were always set aside for what might have been.
You saw in your father the man you might be, in your mother what you should do.
You knew from their faults what should not be done, yet you might do it all again,
So, you denied them, and remade your soul, as if it too was a figment of imagination,
And not the fruit of their own loins, their hope and the product of their best wish.
With trepidation you look back. Is it a pale landscape there, littered with dark shapes?
You feared that dream all your life. Has it come true now, or is some color there yet?
Do you remember too little now, and recount only what you have recalled before?
But that does not make it true. Repeating a falsehood does not make it true.
What is true is what you see around you here—the detritus of a life. Was it good?
Did you do better than you might; or ever “risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss?”
Or do only what you could? Did you then start again, or complain about the loss?
You hide now behind this mask—a map of age—but on this road, you are here.