Neither
After Beckett
It’s not the neither we fear so much as the either.
What choices we made we did not know we were making.
If nothing were the only choice wouldn’t we have accepted it?
But something and then a lesser something;
between these two things there can be no peace
only indecision (that inability to know what’s right is right
even when the wrong was certain to have cleaved
you from crown to feet) remains
staggered between the doors, open or closed,
or, more likely, open and open, your feet moved
as quickly as the fluttering oak’s seeds
with their curious uptilt
turning leaf to propeller.
You were, in other words, going in circles.
If this was a quality you admired in me,
my sense of justice, my ability to see that nothing was wrong
and nothing, equally, right--
They say that a woman, waiting for her lover,
gave up and turned into a tree
or didn’t give up, kept waiting until her feet took root
and continued on until he returned.
Living, he saw only that the she he had known was dead
and in its place stood the brown remains
of what had been devotion.
He turned away from that half open door.
He went back to town and married the butcher’s daughter
whose hands were not quite stained with blood
but smelled constantly of the metal and tannin
of the knife and old soap.
They sat in the winter and ate jerky together
pulling it into pieces until it was soft again.
