Old Poem: A Gradual Slipping out of Circle

This is probably the second best poem (behind Elizabeth) I wrote before I turned 22. I still remember my poetry professor, Ken Mikolowski, saying that the ending reminded him a bit of the imperative in Rilke's line "You must change your life" in Archaic Torso of Apollo, though the part about changing your life is perhaps more implied here (or even the speaker thinks the reader is beyond changing their ways). By the time I wrote this poem, I was already starting to think ahead to all the college friends and acquaintances I would be losing within a year or two (and indeed as Todd B. slips further away, I will soon have no connection at all left to my undergrad years). The concept here is hardly a new one, and I do recall that one of the NELPers (long story) sang a song called "Fade in, Fade out" about friends fading away, though that song would probably be construed as a bit more optimistic than this piece, when it asserted that some people from your past would return.  That has generally not be the case for me (at least partly because of geographic separation), though I have managed to stay in some contact with a handful of people from each stop from graduate school onwards (trying not to let them completely slip away).

A Gradual Slipping out of Circle

The routine is so smooth
that you come to think of it as real.
You ignore the cracks
in order to focus on giving yourself 
a bit of an edge. 
You may have to go too far.
Your friends fade out.
They can’t be reached over the phone.
They don’t see you on the street.
There is no cure for this.

This was the second of three poems in the RC Writer's Still Life with Fruit (1991).  Curiously, there is a minor variant in that publication: "You may have gone too far."  Not bad, though I like the future tense just a bit better in the chapbook version.