I have reached the age where the number stops doing any work.
Twenty-eight was a claim you could make about yourself.
Forty is just the room you happen to be standing in.

I own one good knife and I know exactly where it is.
At twenty-eight I could not have told you where anything was,
including me, including the year.

My friends have developed opinions about mattresses.
We say we should do this more often and we mean it every time
and we do not do it more often. This is not sad.
It is what it costs to have people who would come if you called.

I have started noticing which songs are about being young
and finding I can still like them, which surprised me.
I thought there'd be a door. There is no door.
You just get older in the same room with the same songs playing.

My shoulder has begun to have views on the weather.
It is usually right, which is the annoying part.
The body stops being a thing you have and becomes a thing you consult.

Somewhere there is a version of me who moved to the city
everyone said I should move to, and he is doing fine,
and I don't think about him nearly as much as I expected to.

I water eleven plants. Two of them are ungrateful.
I keep a bear I have had since before I could read.
He is worn down in the exact places I have held him,
which is the only honest map of a life I have ever seen.

The dead have gotten more talkative, not less.
They show up in the middle of ordinary errands
with nothing urgent to say. Just checking the aisle.
Just seeing what I settled on.

At twenty-eight I was afraid of being ordinary.
At forty I am afraid of the opposite,
that some morning I'll wake up interesting
and have to explain it to everyone.

Things I did not get: several. Things I got anyway: several.
The ledger does not balance and nobody has asked it to.

There is a stretch of river near my apartment
where the water is a color no one has named,
and every so often something surfaces that I cannot identify,
and I have decided not to look it up.

The heir is the one still here when the estate is read.
Nobody tells you that's all it means.
Nobody tells you that you inherit the weather too,
and the songs, and the aisle, and the worn places on the bear.

I am forty. The number does no work.
But I can find the knife, and I know who would come,
and I have stopped needing the door.