Sy Safransky

January 2004

Time throws his arm around my shoulder, congratulates me for thirty years of hard work, and hands me a cigar: the exploding kind, I see. I thank him and slip it into my pocket. For later, I say. When my work is done.

December 2003

I don’t want to read the word of Jesus today. I don’t want to read the words of Buddha. Words didn’t help last night when Norma told me how sad she was. I said all the right words. I know I did. Look at all my brave little soldiers, banners flying, rushing to the rescue, marching right off a cliff.

November 2003

The goddess of sleep wants more respect. Eight hours? I object. I tell her I used to get by on four. She tells me I was younger then. I tell her I don’t have time for this conversation.

October 2003

I stopped writing, but nothing else stopped. The days kept getting longer, then shorter, then longer again. The bombs fell, then stopped, then fell again.

A Friend Of The Sun

March 2003

Middle age has been awkward, like adolescence, something to get through. Like a teenager walking out the door for the first time with his father’s car keys, I’m learning what it’s like to be old.

February 2003

It’s temporary, I tell myself. Then I remember that’s true of everything: the blazing fire; our two gray cats; my lovely wife with her long graying hair. If only I never lost sight of this. If only I didn’t shut my eyes except to sleep.

January 2003

I haven’t memorized many poems, but I’ve never forgotten Richard Brautigan’s “Star-Spangled Nails”: “You’ve got / some Star-Spangled / nails / in your coffin, kid. / That’s what / they’ve done for you, / son.” It was published in 1968, when the death toll of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam had climbed to thirty thousand.

December 2002

It takes so long to rub the sleep from my eyes, to shake off the dreams of my father and my father’s father, to remember that, like me, they were just men. Not patriarchs. Not father figures. Just men.

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