13

Seven Dollars & Eighty-Eight Cents

It’s raining
gray & dismal
numbers, the field
quivering in the runnels
along the windowpanes

It’s April near tax day & raining
numbers detached from time,
a list of last year & the trips
I don’t remember taking,
displacement being general

Eight days, eleven days,
twenty two days, forty seven
days, no journey under a couple
thousand in airfare & nothing
that moved the needle

from your arm, knit
a frayed bone, healed a worn
pattern, softened any referral of pain
or relieved the skipping gouge
in our circular groove of history

Yeah, they’re playing our song, again

& we found ourselves swaying
& shoved by circumstance
& terminology into a corner
until we coalesced
after decades of trying

into a flint-chipped
point of
no