Knitting and Time


The exact cost of imperfection is this –
nothing is retrievable / the bullet of history
does not reverse direction, nor come
to rest on the calm beach / in the quiet cove.

This is all a matter of mathematics / the way
my father said / after his stroke / that he was
one hundred and ten percent / and we were
left to imagine exactly what that meant.

We had to suspend reality and imagine that
a lessening of capability and potential
was not negative / but rather positive / the result
of roots on an irrational number line.

Nothing was proven / though one could not deny
that there was a certain potential for possibility.

There is also a potential for fraud / for lies
in the arbitrary way we denote west as different
from east / the melting of reason which occurs
fifty steps across the border of conformity.

Or how love becomes the sheer stress between
people / how an inability to be blind is seen
as the malady of not seeing. And so I remain
at a loss for words / for shutting down reason.

In a crucible of change / I continue to observe
and remember / how the world becomes smaller
with age / how windows continually narrow
until the only thing we see is one isolated atom

and that one atom is as powerful as any false god
has ever been in our worlds of personal deceit.