Sometime after three in the morning, he died of worry. He never saw it coming, and it took him a while to understand what had occurred. He’d never really worried about the possible, the universe of things that might happen, but only, endlessly, about all that had already happened. He considered himself their cause, those things about which there was nothing left to be done. And yet, ridiculous as it seemed, his thought struggled to find ways to reinsert itself into the orderly stream of causes and effects. Thought itself, a kind of residue, it sometimes seemed to him, the brute fact of consciousness, was only life’s untiring attempt to transpose its past into a future, to occupy a place of decision and perspicacity, a land of infinite possibility. But in moments of astonishing lucidity, he’d see the deathless persistence of his so-called life as a world of accomplished fact, a product of the impossible, filled to capacity with what was, what has been, leaving no room for action, no room for anything but this impersonal concern, this unquenchable urgency, this undying regret. As his death began to dawn on him, he realized there was nothing to be done about it. He understood that it had somehow always been there, in the past that stands beside each present moment, and like the past, unavailable to decision, refractory to all initiative, indifferent to action or decisive inaction. And so, without options, he continued on as he always had, continued on as usual.
DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. He is the author of two collections, both of which, along with other examples of his work, can be accessed at jonaspoetry.com.