For Shannon

When the news came that the young poet had passed
I was noodling through a bad rendition
of some classic rock song on my guitar,
imagining that I was still capable of making it
in a world I never attempted to conquer until
I was too old for a realistic chance.

I was fourteen when I first pulled the pen off a page
in a lined notebook, looked down at what was there, and said:
This. This is who I am. I knew I was the tool
of words. I knew the road would be long, the pain
of walking it would be too strong to bear at times,
but I knew then there was no path beside that one for me.

These days I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened
if I had had a guitar at that time. If I’d had
the time and the passion to blunt my fingers down
to bone and callus and make myself into the image
of my idols. If I had given up the path of the word.

The guitar is superfluous to my story, of course.
All I mean to say is this: there are paths
before us all, and every one is as much the remnant
of a path not taken as it is a calling. When I learned
of the young poet’s passage, I saw the path she took
as clearly as I can see mine now: the initiating voice,
the urge to say something only I could say at the time,
the long nights writing past the stones that cracked my soles,
the luminous moments when the pen stopped
and the face of the poet I dreamed I could be was dimly visible,
a pale moon in the depth of a mirror.

We take what we are given. We walk, we run, we move through the world.
We create our selves where we find our selves. The guitar
holds my sense of regret at what could have could have been, but
as I see her now, somewhere more certain, in a place where she can say
with no doubt in her voice: This, this is who I am,
my urge to put these clumsy hands on these strings
seems as pointless as a death in summer,
on a bright day,
when the world stops
to mourn and agree:

This.
This is who she was,
and we are the better
for her certainty.