“Midlife” by Zachary Johnson

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In the summer of work, in the summer of solitude.
Even the road crews hold back greetings
like a beaten hand. And sun,
the cruelest stare, burning, burns away the angels
from the ozone. Let’s say, on argument, he is thirty-two,
alien: upright, manlike.
Don’t go berserk!—Let’s assume he isn’t evil.
Let’s propose that his soul
stretched out towards everything,
leaves him totally empty. Just as emptied as the next
hollow, and the next. Who is anyone,
zipping up streets, down streets, like voids in steel shams?
Oh, but hot summer days.
Oh, but night after night of lonely worker
swallowing liquor on a tar-bed.
So how old? Thirty-something, we said,
finds him alone. Long ago, he had netted a soul or two
along the way (I mean snagged lips,
fishing, there, among memories). But now
he lets the floating float, and drifts himself
through the dry spell of summer without a rainbow,
without a woman, without
a mirror for his soul.

-Zachary Johnson

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