On this the most holy of days I wish I wasn’t writing my sins
on the back of my kid’s Learner’s Permit, though I suppose it’s appropriate
for what am I to God, to anyone to the people I love and hurt and love
but a student, perpetually sharpening her pencil blowing off the gray dust
spiral of shavings? I know an artist who did that. Worked hour after hour
to produce a spiraling pencil’s worth of unbroken yellow. A strange beauty
that undoing. Whereas I lack talent or patience. I tabulate small
deaths of conscience, the lost, soft unmuscled places
of my will. Everything happens while everything else happens
somebody famous said, and it’s what I’m chewing on as I pump gas
beneath the 7-11’s nacreous lights, interstate pulsing behind me and in the sky
an arrow of geese clacking their exit aligning and realigning
a continual shifting of priorities that reminds me what my body already knows
that it’s getting colder and darker earlier and earlier. A tow truck
pulls in, hauling a dead tour bus, casino trip interrupted, ruptured
fractured by chance, and I finish filling my tank an innocuous act
though it has consequences. But that’s not what’s got me on my knees.
Reader, we’re alone until we need something. We huddle colonize.
My son failed so many tests. What did I teach? I left holes.
