Rachel bought me a very sweet little follow-up gift for my 50th birthday. Every year Black Sparrow press used to make a New Year's card and send them out. She found me a bunch of them between 1985-200, all of them including a few uncollected poems by Bukowski. They must be collector items. Just little books she found for me, because she was looking. She can be such a very sweet woman. It is good to be loved by her. I spent a handful of years here outlining my frustrations with her, and her love, but you are under no obligation to believe any of that if you so choose. It's what I do, also - choose.
I chatted with CS the other day. He feels similarly, or so I gathered. His romantic partner has helped usher him back towards health, back from his head-on collision with a truck. Back from the dead, if you let him tell it.
On the days that I go to the gym and lift dumbbells over my head in a wide dual arc from the waist to a zenith point above my head and then back again I sometimes think about the titanium supported ribs he now has, how much such a thing will hurt when he can return to it, if he wishes to return to it, which I imagine he must. Who would elect to do anything else?
With aging, I have become more sympathetic and understanding. It barely seems a choice - one of the little things I get to lie to myself about, congratulating my idea of myself as if it were really me, freely optioning in for another year, selecting the advancing digits for pre-approval as they arrive in front of me. Light as morning, heavy as coffee spoons.
... have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons
.
