by Louis Daniel Brodsky
Intimations of Futility
If only I had
A biography of my life
To go by,
I could rely on hindsight for answers,
Refer to causes célèbres,
Read portions
Where I needed to make decisions
At forks in the road.
The sheer idea of perfection,
Heroism, statesmanship,
Debonair and scrupled wealth,
A Picassoed physique
Buckles my stagnant mind.
It’s the second-guessing
We lack, vision with a voice,
The crystal discipline
That allows death’s finger
To flick its rim without breaking it
Yet achieve an outbound ring
Whose sympathies unloose
The introspective I,
Set it free
To scribe its autobiography.
With tabula rasa, we arrive;
We leave with the slate erased.
Everything in between is all we are.
Summary:
This book’s thirty-eight poems stitch Brodsky’s "awareness of days passing" into a crazy-quilt whose patches are the beautifully detailed memories captured from his daily life at home in Farmington, Missouri, his business trips throughout the Midwest, and his vacations to Fort Lauderdale, with his wife.
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