Sundown

By the time we recognize
the aged faces of our oldest friends’ parents
in their faces,
we are ourselves
old.
The creases in their foreheads,
the ginger steps of their thread-veined legs,
the freckled humps of their upper backs,
the deep lines down their forearms.
These faces were unimagined
to ever be our own,
but are our own
– now –
just the same.
We get there,
misconstrued and mishandled,
we get there –
confused between fifty ways to leave your lover
and more than one way to skin a cat.
Which is it? we ask.
It can be no fluke that the same unlined faces
which lined the schoolyards
are now the same despondent faces
lining the outsides of them.
The same deep line down the forearm of time –
DNA trickling, trickling –
eyes aglaze with ennui and acrimony, interchangeably.
All of the boats are identical.
All of the shores are dusted with the same dazzling sand
we can never reach.

No one can.

We get to the place
where the lines are drawn
on us.
We see the point on the line
where we started
and the point where it all will end
for us,
but go on
just the same.

We get there.