The Closing Scene

The Closing Scene

Utterly, I thought, with lots of closure, 

the sort of terminus where all the ends

converge together neatly tied. A meteor,

perhaps, or just a cosmic resignation 

from the heating source; maybe an anchorman

who groans God Bless America while in 

the background taxis scream and women sprint

off frame. But as it tends to do, my thinking 

on this has changed—experience, perhaps, 

or lack thereof,

                                      of such clean breaks. 

A period is hard to find these days. 

Instead, my current postulation is that 

it all will fizzle, slow and anticlimactic, 

like sophomore love or when the milk runs thin

mid-pour. Likely it will feel like reaching

the end of something promising—a poem, 

say—and finding out this wasn't yet 

the ending they'd imagined and so they left

it as it is, incomplete and unraveled, 

like most things worth their weight, but nonetheless 

a source of present frustration

                                                              to say the least.