The Paris Review

Young

I tried, and each attempt was a fiasco. 
I yearned, but every love of mine was wrong. 
I needed, and the shame was overwhelming. 
I failed, and so I hated being young.                                                 

Middle-aged 

He was middle-aged which 
means that the mixture of 
death and life in him was 
still undetermined. And 
all of a sudden he took 
an unwarranted turn—impul- 
sive, convulsive. As in 
those nineteenth-century 
plays where the roof gets 
blown off the convention- 
al house and the audience 
is left to gape at the 
heroine bareheaded—him. 
He has a gift for self- 
serious hyperbole and he 
resorts to it regularly 
to describe and explain 
his behavior. Not that 
anything happened. But 
he stared into something, 
an abyss or a garden, and 
now in the aftermath he’s 
more alone than before. 
He has not been forgiven, 
not that he wants to be. 
What he wants is to know 
what he saw, that it wasn’t 
theatrics. But that’s 
hard to achieve, things 
being what they are, the 
others implicated being 
themselves. So he walks 
in circles and wonders 
and kicks at the leaves.