I find that rowing-life is just one life.

Waking up at five a.m. to compete

for a place I may never earn, working

constantly just to say I am part of something.

Every person has lives upon lives and 

all rowers have a rowing-life. 

But we all too have a family-life,

like my family-life with 

my sister holding me from one end

and my beagle curled against the other end.

I suppose there’s beagle-life too, when I

watch him chase dogs at the dog park and

wonder how he is so happy.

His beagle-life so simple, he eats, he sleeps, he plays.

Life-life is complicated, the waking, the breathing,

sickness and hospitals and 

hospital-life for a while.

One life disturbs another, and the other

disturbs the first. We run around in search of life

like we are not surrounded, like we are not

all living our magnificent lives,

love-life, grief-life, sex-life, all the spheres of

existence little marbles in the marble run

until the death-life. The end.