A while ago a writer friend and I hiked through the Vermont woods and talked about how at some point you understand it’s too late to become fluent in five languages, to have a sixty-year marriage, to make a life on an island off the coast of Maine, to undo what you wish you hadn’t done.

We talked about how some things you thought you wanted were precluded from the start by circumstances, or by your own personality. Because you were frantically busy trying to earn a living, or raise your children, or hold yourself together. Because you crave solitude, time to make art.

We went to a restaurant we loved, where the pieces of cake were unfathomably gigantic. We talked about our books, and how often we feel like failures. I laughed at him, one of the greatest writers in the world, and he laughed at me. Then I said Should we split a piece of Gigantic Cake, and he said Hell no! I’m getting my own damn Gigantic Cake! and now I’m laughing all over again. I feel so lucky to have friends like him, and to live this odd life of mine, so full of failure and love in equal measure.

Lucky, by Kirsten Dierking

All this time,
the life you were
supposed to live
has been rising around you
like the walls of a house
designed with warm
harmonious lines

As if you had actually
planned it that way.

As if you had
stacked up bricks
at random,
and built by mistake
a lucky star.

Click here for more information about Kirsten Dierking. Today’s poem first appeared in Northern Oracle, published in 2007 by Spout Press.

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