Cursives

How your cares write themselves
on the chalkboard of your brow—
litany of looped hurts and

disappointments you wish
the mottle-winged moth would
brush away as it sweeps, haltingly,

across the surface of the floor.
Is it necessarily one or another
effect of age that you can’t fathom

why your son would rather live in sin
with his pregnant girlfriend, than go
before a justice of the peace and do

the right thing? or that you
want to chuck nearly thirty years
at the same job because you woke up

near dawn with the epiphany that, all
these years, you were really meant to be
a cabinet-maker in a village with one

main street? A mosquito lands on curls
of wood shavings the soft, creamy
color of skin. And we too tremble

at the same instinct: sweet blood, some
joy we’ve long postponed— And the years
click like beads of an abacus in the veins.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.