I’m sorry, first of all,
for the impersonal
medium. It’s midnight and I’m spread
so thin I just about said spin so thread.
Sage came home with a strip of masking tape
across her lunchbox: PLEASE SLICE EVERY GRAPE.
And there again I’ve put a blameless child
between us like a human shield
against accountability, and then
acknowledged it. And there again.
As though by self-embarrassment alone
I might regress
into a truer self, becoming small
and solid as the last matryoshka doll;
as though that might redress
the failings up to which I’ve failed to own:
I’ve identified too closely with
myself, or with my sympathetic myth.
I’ve acted as though it were all an act —
the first of five — and called the fact
the brutal fact and failed to call
the fourth wall a wall.
And all while waiting for the world to drop
the dozen of us at a common stop
so you could keep me company again,
which would require the world to be a train.
The world’s a wheel. The world’s a rolling pin.
The world is spinning thread and spreading thin.
I can’t imagine what this goes to prove
except the obvious — I’d rather move
than mow. But you asked whether the address
you have for me is current. No. Yes.

~~~

Eric McHenry teaches creative writing at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. He is the author of a book of poems, Potscrubber Lullabies (Waywiser, 2006), and the recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2007.