middle age

the midpoint between hope and resignation.

the time when everything goes wrong 

for everyone you know.

parents, diagnoses, marriages, careers, addictions

children, or the lack of children.

the age when, if you're lucky,

you've accumulated enough money to know for sure

that it will not make you happy.

tired out; at the place that runners call the wall.

they say that if you run through you get a second wind,

and maybe the peace of older people is just that --

patched sails belled out, carrying

you and your motley crew ever onward

into uncharted waters.

easy. the wind at your back.
all downhill from here.

The letter I did not write to Ursula Le Guin

Your writing has always felt so clean to me,
like a room swept out in anticipation.
Not sterile — soft-edged, everything made by hand.
Neat. Straightened gently.
A room passed through by many, a place of history and expectation both —
bright, full of air, suffused with warmth
and perhaps a breeze or the evocation, through the open window,
of distant winged things.
Such a comfort to me, that place that is your writing.
Aired out, turned over, like the guest room in a monastery,
where every one of a thousand travelers stops
with astonishment and thinks —
all this was done for me.