I always hate when I get
to the final chapter of the novel
especially the last few pages
when I have to start considering
what I will read next and
I start to wonder about how
it will end even though I already know.
I know the writer puts emphasis
on this ending, it will be the last
thing he leaves you with, and
there are novels with such beautiful
endings, even or especially the sad ones.
I am up late again and out tonight
the late autumn crickets are singing
just as they did in the beginning,
and the cars are coming up
and down the road, people are
moving, falling in love, and out,
making love, kissing, arguing,
drinking, and fighting loneliness
and their own demons.
I have been up with too much
on my mind, trying to remember
the first words of the book
so I might write the last ones.
I forgot to save the pages, or
they were washed away in the flood.
I will have to recreate them, but
for now I am attempting an ending.
John Irving doesn’t write
the first line of a book
until he has written the last.
If this one ends this way,
then that end is also a beginning.
Maybe there was death at the beginning,
or the thought of, or the fear of,
or was it love, a smile, comfort after
many long days, was a corpulent arm
throwing change to the beggars below,
or did it begin or end with him coming
home after a long day, and her waking
in a monologue, ‘yes I said yes I will Yes.’
Some things end that way, or others
with a ‘no nope never’ and some don’t tidy
up so easily.
I remember something sloppy
at the beginning of this book.
Perhaps a metaphor misplaced
or carried on too long. Something
was not right and it carried
its discomfort through all of the pages.
I hate this feeling at the end,
when you start reading so much faster,
and inevitably the phone rings
right as you are reaching the rapturous finale.
This one will end right where it began, I suppose.
The pages will loop back on themselves
and I will not have to worry
about what to read next,
and all of the unkempt ends
will smooth and fray and smooth and fray,
and we will lose sight of
the beginning or ending,
and it will just go on,
fall in love and out,
and in and out until it all ends,
or at least one of us.
Where did it end? Or begin? Or does it?
It was love,
it was love,
it was love,
no matter what the critics will say.