The most terrifying exercise I know is to calculate how many seconds I can expect to live. I refuse. Never send to know for whom the clock ticks. It ticks for thee (not me). I heard my dad in his sixties tell a buddy, “I don’t plan to die.” He was sipping and smoking and enjoying himself. He had another couple of decades left in him at the time. It was a good plan.

Time, time, time… You can’t live with it and can’t live without it. Can’t pump more of it or drill for new reserves. Just runs out when it’s good and ready, and you’re done. Let it count down on its own clock, not on mine.

Blame these straggly thoughts on Trey Moody. In “Against Distance” (Poetry, May 2024) he writes a single sentence that goes for fourteen lines of a seventeen-line poem. The sentence starts here…

I don’t know who needs to hear this
other than me, but the moon will never leave
you,…

and ends here:

… so when you try counting your remaining
moments with the moon, the moon
that will never, ever leave you, give up.

It’s a transparent, readable sentence, too, not Proustian or Jamesian — you know what I mean. Then Moody does a deft turn in the last three lines: Writes three sentences in quick succession, and one of them is a zinger. By that I mean it has the aphoristic sheen of a nugget so quotable it cries out for citation even out of context. I don’t take the bait. Here in toto are the last three lines of the poem with the embedded zinger:

Even the moon inches a little more distant
every year. I’ve heard grief is only love
with nowhere to go. But then you look up.

It may not be the “best” poem of the lot — who am I to distinguish good from bad? — but the moment of my reading it, usually morningtide, and the fact of it saying a particular something in a given way conspire not to “trigger” in me — that word is grubby now — but to wring from me a flicker of joy. You take it where you find it.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved