1.

My mother was a school teacher.

She worked hard in the city all day,

so she wrote a classified ad

for a homemaker to raise me

and nurse me for pay, to lay me

down in a crib beside her fifth child:

a fair boy, who is now a grown man,

with flushed cheeks and dark lashes.

2.

Now I am a teacher in a gray

endless city. I lecture about 

sentences and poetics to grown men

and women who know more

about the world than I. 

When we read the autobiography 

of a martyred American man, 

Q took me aside and told me

a harrowing tale about how he crossed

paths with the great man's

assassins. Sometimes it is hard to know

who teaches whom and what is the lesson.

So let the cards fall where they may.

Sometimes the mind goes

very still, the eyes loosen

and you see for a moment

life branching like capillaries

in cryptic and fractal patterns.