By Katie Ford
I failed him and he failed me—
Together our skinned glance makes a sorry bridge
For some frail specter who can't get through.
I failed him
but maybe it was the lamp that failed,
Maybe it was the meal,
Maybe it was the potter
Who would not intervene, maybe the clay,
Maybe the plateau's topaz, too steady to help,
Or was it the meat cut two days late, was it
The deciduous branch and its dull wait for bloom—
But I remember the small thing rotating in us
Towards hunger, how it did not fail to guide,
And that we made no request of our souls or all souls
Or the one perfectly distant soul
and so did not fail in what we did not do,
Never begging at the sky but moving
On the islands beneath it, hungry together by its rivers and bones.
Who told us we had failed
If not the human world gone wrong?
It was the world?
Ah, then we will fail again and again in the waters apart,
Bridging nothing, bridging nowhere
Towards what we, failures, are.
--------
Adam played tennis with my father in the morning while Daniel slept in and I did chores; then Adam went to a friend's graduation party while we had lunch with Daniel and took him to Great Falls. The weather was magnificent and the water was still pretty high from last week's storms. We saw lots of animals -- geese with goslings, three little red skinks, two big black snakes, several turtles, at least a dozen great blue herons in the sky and sharing the big rocks in the middle of the river:
Paul smashed the passenger side mirror of our minivan while trying to pass another van, so we tried to find a dealership that could replace it before graduation on Tuesday (not anywhere in our county). Our neighbors for whom Adam does yard work invited us to their barbecue; we had dinner there and hung out with other neighbors. Then we came home to watch The Lego Movie, which remains awesome, on VOD with Daniel Wigle, plus we caught up on The Colbert Report with Patrick Stewart.
No comments:
Post a Comment