Set primarily in a garden alongside a tidal river in Maine, River Road maps the troubled path of a middle-aged man torn between longing for an idealized past that never existed and realizing he must remain vulnerable to a future of love.
Over Breakfast . . . he said,
We need to reinvent
ourselves, meaning not so much the
pair as the each of us, as if we
could unroll the raw blue-print of
being, right there
on the table between us
by setting our bowls and cups at
the corners to fix it
in place and staring down
abstract anew the physics of stress and
tolerance into other schemata, as if time
were a constant
and love, an infinite variable
that always yields a positive future, but
one yet together, as if mindfulness were
will and will by necessity commands
action. So we sat, long, looking each into
the other's eyes.