High Cold Noon

If you’re someone for whom continuing

Has always been more Plan B, every day

Extends that contingency plan in play.

Real lives . . . shiver through us, leaving their mark,

The reviewer, wisely, writes, and it’s true,

But the mark that’s left is not a real life.

The lizard basking on the basalt slab

In the warmest hour of December sun,

The one hour strong enough to warm cold blood,

Is life. It does what it does to stay life,

And that’s how real lives differ from the mark

Left by the shivering of other lives,

For whom just getting by and nothing else

Was not the first plan they planned for themselves.