I’ve grown weary of writing about my life. What once felt like a ground strike of purpose, the filling of a great pool one cupful at a time, has become a meretricious dance of expectancy. I no longer observe my life in poems and find narratives in my woe. I gaze up at a moment of irony or a spring of hurt and eye it with the jadedness of someone who has too long felt obligation to such a thing.

But weariness has been the cool current that has moved me through the entirety of 31. A creature o...