Sunshine Park

Week before last, I looked at the boyfriend I had and said, don’t plan the rest of your life around this. The boyfriend I wanted said the same to me.

I traded out my apartment for a smaller one, for fewer possessions, less talk. It was absolution in the non-religious sense. Without attachment,

I claim nothing, owe nothing. I’d dreamt the snowy streets we’d made between each other and now I turn and let illusion vanish

in their dusky margins like an unleashed dog. I let it go so I could know myself in its absence. The truckers, the slow busses and I

take the same stretch past the Holiday Inn, the Big Y and around a screwy curve at the town center. A shabby corner promises nothing but a view

above the river’s high-walled flood chute, a place to stand and watch the ice swim, more and more passing by the glittering minute.

And look, if I refused to see clearly, if I went too long believing one thing was another, it wasn’t ignorance but habit, a way I once applied myself

so that the most limiting facts might also be extraordinary. It’s how I lived, what my circumstances required and if that’s true, what’s truer now — the difference

of these middle years — is what I can admit, what I accept and name plainly: the unlovely growth, the current winter, a run of days bright as they are cold.