When I announced my leaving to study poetry

you said, fine, but remember you can’t eat words.

Maybe you expected me to live on your diet

of numbers, to live in a world as true as a wall

or floor. Measure twice, cut once, you said.



Maybe that’s how you love a son. Give him

a solid geometry to hold in his hand,

a way to build what people will buy. In the end

you set me loose to the images in my head

that turned into piles of paper in a drawer.



Isn’t the earth numberless and older than science?

God with no T-square, no level, just eyeballed

creation, starting with nothing but a Word.

Do you think He ached when His son fled carpentry,

just to die for the abstract sins of strangers?