TURNING SEVENTY

by Alan Shapiro

What if this “turning” really did mean going round, not as in rounding a corner to whatever

happens to be next, but in the faux-affirmative, Nietzschean sense of a turning back, living this

life “again and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it but every pain and

every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great eternally

returning?” The great good luck of finding you so late, and then, too, in consequence of that,

the loss that one of us will face so soon. Would I want to? Should I want to? Because, look, if I

could live it all again, then wouldn’t everybody have to, not just the stars and co-stars in the

story of my life, but the whole crew and the extras too-- the panhandlers I didn’t give a cent to

panhandling forever in the dead of winter in a shabby square; those two kids fighting in an alley

as I hurried by, pretending not to see; drunk I stepped over that one time on my way to work?

Wouldn’t everybody, for my sake, have to live it through again? Wasn’t once enough? And

never mind the wars and revolutions, that bomb, those camps, the outrageous pay outs,

payoffs, the short-term buck passing, the long-term depredation. Even if the fantasy were real,

something more than just a godless way for the lucky ones to grasp at straws and call it choice

or meaning, what difference would it make, all of us going round and round forever in a circle

that’s so immeasurably vast, its curvature after all would be entirely undetectable, which is to

say, identical to the straight line we’re all on now, moving at different paces in the same

direction to the same one place through our separate and unequal lives.

Alan Shapiro’s recent books are Dress Rehearsal for the Truth: essays on poetry, identityand belonging (2024); By and By, (2023), and Proceed to Check Out (2022). His new book ofpoems, Diver, will be published in 2026 by Unbound Editions.