Taking Stock

-

 TAKING STOCK


— a birthday poem


Well, let’s see. Thirty years of this 

and nothing to show for it but 

one life, which has turned out to be far more

mundane than the lives of those other

thirty-year-olds I fought alongside

as a kid on various missions out back, 


but I have two daughters and a wife

who appreciate my mundanity, 


and then there’s still this wild hope 

to reckon with, the dormant one

ever growing inside of me

alongside the cancer cells likely

just beginning to stretch molecular legs, 


and if trajectory means anything

will continue growing until they discover it 

too late to remove and declare me

a case with no remission.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Holly

-
  HOLLY             — a yellow labrador One day you'll say your childhood  dog’s name and it will sound  a bit odd, flat , as if it  were someone else’s pet  who wandered its way  like a hair into your mouth.  You haven’t thought about her  much the past few years,  but still, you didn’t expect she’d just disappear like that.  The scary part isn’t that she’s gone— you loved her, but it’s a given dogs will run away, true  to their nature. What haunts you,  rather, is the crowd of other constancies milling about your house, the question of which will slip out next if you forget  and leave the door open,  even just a crack. The girl lying next to you? The name of your homeroom teacher? The drive home, those turns you know in your bones? And then  what really troubles you is how   you’ll go on living without them around anymore, how you might even do just fine at it.
Read more

Over the Know-ledge

-
OVER THE KNOW-LEDGE  Take a geometric shape, a space.  Eliminate the edges, then once  again erase those stubborn edges that your mind—like so much loose sand—insists on filling in.  Forgive it this propensity, this in-born  habit of fencing in to verify what’s what. It likes to know  what it’s dealing with, but for today’s  exercise we’ll need to exorcise  this hard-wired love of lines and open the cage if we're to meet the one we're after, the one who does the dealing. Now look at what you’re holding. Nothing?  Everything? Are you even sure you're the one doing the holding anymore? Hard to see, or say. On second thought, why look? I f you look it goes away. Welcome to the turvy-topsy, your intro course in dyslexic theology in which you meet the one in whom we being and whom and have. The textbook's wild and illegible as a dog—no wait, a God—unleashed, so your best bet is to ride it out, the way you would when your insides want out, hunched over the toilet and all of
Read more

7th Period

-
7th PERIOD Safe to assume we’ve probably got it  mostly wrong, or if not quite wrong  then likely a right that’s misinterpreted the question. That being said, students,  the fact remains that at the construction site  behind the classroom there’s a trailer-load of 2-by-10’s used to frame the concrete  foundation that I struggle to believe  they’re throwing away. Perhaps  it would be a more advantageous  use of our day were we to spend what’s left  of class time shouldering lumber across campus to the bed of my truck.  I, for one, plan on spending a few afternoons of my remaining puzzlement to puzzle  together a table where my children can pick up the pondering where I left off. It seems as good  a use of time as any. It's coarse work, but with every pass of the paper you can’t help  but feel that you’re getting somewhere,  like maybe, in the proverbial 8th period,  we’ll get up from our desks and gather round just such a table, sharing a laugh  about how splintered it all used to b
Read more