Life is a parachute drop into unknown territory
a landing in the middle of a forest
with only one’s imagination as a guidepost.
Happy he, who like Dante, discovers
his destination. The rest of us, poor fools
poor losers, must go higgledy-piggledy
past signs and signals, the language
of which is unlearned, or worse, unwritten.
In the end, there is only this admonition:
Be of good cheer. Take pleasure in the scenery.
Imagine this the Via Appia,
and that is Rome in the distance.
So remember: Our job is to start
though the work is encyclopedic.
Here there are endless volumes,
unnumbered pages,
a reading of Proust from cover to cover,
a calculation
that an intelligent main-frame would find insuperable.
Landing is easiest. Dorothy landed, eventually, in Kansas.
Lolita, transformed by pregnancy, might well have adjusted.
Ulysses, in his next incarnation,
was a homebody and a farmer.
All of us: we either suicide or we sublimate,
or we evolve into something entirely new and unexpected.