Zero
Four stars in the form of the forking path
stretched out across the window frame, a bow
of turbid June air that longs across our huge, taut, world.
Little slivers of linoleum litter the rollers, mugs,
and knives on the table like the igneous soil of a newborn island’s
shoreline making its first feeble bracing
against the black, salty, ocean. Zero. Our chewed-up
stamps of pallid greens and grays versus the valiant
galley of prints on the floor: in our implicit wager
that the permanences of each were interchangeable
cowered an image of terrific waste. The spray of slivers
testified to our mistake, that what we carve out in our dealings of change
or fear, where seared into the contract is the promise
to leave behind the children who we were, could really
be destroyed. In Rabbi Hayley’s d’var she wondered if the healing
scar over her neck where doctors cut out a thyroid
could be ḥok, at once a law and an engravement,
wondered what we could be for each other without this fear
of healing. Of knowing the island is also a wound
whose neonatal heat is bitterly stung by the depthscold
of healing. I thought of the slivers again, the biopsy
of Rabbi Hayley’s thyroid or my own appendix sleeping
in a landfill. Zero. I thought of the four stars
in the shape of a crab looking down on a missing world.