Jamaal May
In a sixth grader’s notebook
only two lines are written:
I go outside. I look at the stars.
Then I’m sad because of death and stuff—
At a funeral when I was her age, I punched
dots into the program with a bow
compass then held it to the light
to trace paths I drew between holes.
Those constellations. The paths
drawn between neurons. Their firing
is how I think.
She adds in pencil
the castle of the mind is full
of hundreds of bright specters—
and I wonder what’s going on in her head
and mine. What sky did we fall from?
sounds like an appropriate question,
when I think about it
but it’s too much to ask a child, right?
••
Outside, I ask a steel sculpture
ascending from the depths
of museum grass if I am
contextualized by its immensity.
The bending blades of grass
told me it’s not appropriate
to ascribe words—
which become ideas,
and soon become my ideas—
to them, as they’ve done nothing wrong.
The wind says
nothing
we can’t figure out on our own,
I said, but no one was talking to me.
••
A melon falls from a bag,
a platoon of ants pours in
and out of its gash,
and I wonder if it takes being broken
open and emptied
to be filled with something new.
Didn’t a poet say cracks are how light gets in everything?
I’m probably mixing that up.
But this is how I think. Give me a box,
and I’ll fill it with dirt
or fill it with water
or fill it with both
and trouble that mire
with whatever stick I happen to find.