A Better Life

A Better Life

 

Randall Mann

after Julio Cortázar

 

It’s silly to think

fourteen years ago

I turned thirty.

 

How I made it that far

I’ll never know.

In this city of hills,

 

if there was a hill

I was over it. Then.

(In queer years,

 

years

are more than.)

Soon it will be fifteen

 

since the day I turned thirty.

It’s so remote.

I didn’t think I’d make it

 

to fourteen years ago.

Fear lives in the chest

like results.

 

You say my gray, it makes

me look extinguished;

you make me cringe.

 

I haven’t cracked

the spines of certain paperbacks,

or learned a sense of direction,

 

even with a slick device.

But the spleen doesn’t ask twice,

and soon it will be fifteen years

 

since I turned thirty.

Which may not sound like a lot.

Which sounds like the hinge

 

of a better life:

It is, and it is not.