Long before I understood
what Hegel meant by
a “highway of despair,”
or knew or cared who he was,
far down inside somewhere,
I understood that most of those
tobacco-spitting, quick-to-be-enraged
TV cowboys and gangsters
would all one day be dead,
not just pretending, but gone,
buried, done with. That my always-
obsessed-with-success father
and radiantly devoted mother
and forever-praying-to-a-God-
ignorant-of-her grandma, along
with everybody downstairs
and us kids up in the balcony
every Saturday morning, would
one day be nowhere to be found,
along with everyone in Mr. Bein’s
big red bus and the never-smiling
blue-rinse cashier at Freddy’s Ice Cream
and just about every squeaky-clean-
brassiere-and-raincoat-trying-on
customer in Sibley’s Department Store,
and even the sour fluorescence
we all sat under at school would
one day become part of Hegel’s
arcane highway, stretching all the way
to this August Sunday morning
in which my wife and two sons
are happily asleep upstairs while
I’m sitting here in my study, watching
these curious filaments of thought
filter through the dusty pink light,
for the time being.