I fear I have too many fears. I fear I had too few, for too long.

I fear my love is not real, my compassion a facade, that other people feel something more real, more ecstatic, more steady, when they love.

I fear my love for my children will devour me at times, that it will use me up and I will die soon from worry, from fret, from how much I want them to live, from how helpless I am to keep them alive and safe and happy, no matter what.

I fear a Call someday that will take one of them away, that I will be alone, that I might lose them all to a drunk driver, or their own error, and I will rustle around no one ever again, on my way to the kitchen cabinet, for a plate.

I fear I will never be alone, I will never be able to do as i like, whenever I like, that their noise and needs and me-first will leave me exhausted and un-necessary, a dead, hard, and final seedless fruit, a husk in the bottom of a forgotten sack, in the back of the upper shelf, behind the rusted cans of gooseberries and clamato juice and a small tomato paste. Unclaimed, to be thrown away when they move on.

I fear I will lose my temper and even after so many decades hurt someone I love. That I am my father after all, and I fear I will do this even just once and never, ever be able to forgive myself.

I fear my children will be successful but unhappy.

I fear they will feel that damned, endless, bottomless hole in the world someday, suddenly realizing you are Wrong, and have Wronged someone. Someone undeserving. And they will cringe forever recalling it, and tear, in a soundless howl, once, forever, that muscle in their cheeks/jaw/along their mouth; that muscle that is round and resilient and helium-filled when we are children. And they will never again smile all the way.

I fear they will do this and thus be ordinary adults, with regrets. No, please, not my little ones, for them let the earth always be primary and full of strong ropes and full platters and the cooling wind from the ice above, not the freeze itself.

I fear I will always fail.

I fear I will forget myself.

I fear I will lose the mind I have, like my grandfather Alva, that I have already had my first stroke, last December; that I will someday look on This, these words, and wonder who wrote them, not remember this feeling NOW: this little whip-crack of wrist  and taps (and words) and small glances from keyboard to screen (and words) while my Real Self is Somewhere Else (within the words), inside these passions and fears (floating up as words) and my thinking will be gone, all of Holiness itself; these gestures  and twitches and yet my Life, nothing less, expressed here to you, Dear Reader; I fear I will be someday Dear Reader who does not Know, will not remember, who will not know that he does not Know, will find no track in This, and will not miss This, what he never knew he owned.

I fear I will someday try to own This, possess it, master it, attach the wrong Name to it, mistake mirror for me, look back on my Eurydice and suddenly lose it all; watch as my muse and beloved and all ability pulls into the dark cavern of never again, never was, never to be found.

I fear I fool myself that she is behind me at all, that she and I are approaching the light and are, together, the crocus of Art. I fear I am a fool, puddling words in heaps,  like a child hoards crayons at his end of the table, mistaking all the piled color for a Real Work.

I fear I will never be published. I fear it might matter more to me than writing someday, and I will thus make The Mistake.

I fear nothing but lies, and yet I fear I will say too much.

I fear my childish, delirious passion for my First Wife was madness, like hers; I fear I will never feel it again; I fear my Good and True Wife will not understand this. I fear my messy and crowded truths.

I fear I will die before all my stories are told.

I fear I must work myself to death to pay someone' else's debt.

I fear I will not get my works done.

I fear my works are as good as I know they are and they will never make it to paper.

I fear I will do the right things, make the right sacrifices, have these small things to show for myself, to prove this was real but no more than real, forever unfulfilled, and have magnificent children, magnificent lives made strong by what I did not allow for myself, magnificent hearts who finally see I CHOSE this for them, set aside my needs with eyes wide open, open palms, willing hands -- and then, just as I go, just as the last whiffle-hiss of chrome and oxygen fails, their hands in mine, their love a certainty, their magnificent beauty and wholeness and safety assured, I will feel the anguish of loss, and it will be the last thing I feel, as I go: the art of me, undone, the epics, in notes and fragments, uncollected -- I will live one moment too long, a terrible resentment sounding a last sour note distorting my last living beat, catching me, twisting me, before I can recover the good, and I will go down wrong, done in by horror and regret.

I fear I still do not know what I owe, or to whom I must pay.

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