Soft Nipple of Time

The soft nipple of time has suckled me so long that now I stand in the snow and listen, is that the last heart beat, is that the last breath, or will my cinder-rimmed train notch enough years to qualify me? Can I find poetry in this coming derailment?

Standing on a set of circumstances, my brother, his wheels spinning like a dropped bicycle, chisels ice free from his driveway, proactive, vigilant, and tells me how hard it is, not the ice, the ice only a metaphor for his accumulation of attachments, each one lovely as a snow flake, each one slowly compacting into something slippery and hard, dangerous by-product from the weather of the heart.

My father these last days, noticing how the care-aids see him failing, quotes for me Longfellow:

Life is real!  Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Art is long, and time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

Be a hero in the strife!

His father had memorized it...so had he apparently... a psalm to action, a call to engage, and my father, holding open the curtain of life a little longer, is not some dumb ruminant, not content to be driven.

Is that what keeps us going in the end, those of us who huddle in the bivouac of life? The resistance against the herd, the sweet strong pleasure of your own foot prints in the snow, a mind awake and thinking, all by itself?