Barnes

We mocked him as unselfconscious
when he read Nun's Priest's Tale
pinky finger digging in his ear
his hair raked back in furrows
like the field the first plow broke.

He was on a tangent – 
nobody ever erased anything anymore
just scratched thru, or crumpled
up whole pages, people who
had never smelled a papermill.
He could pull, he thought
pencils from all our bookbags
and hold them up, the erasers
like virgin clitorises,
each with a tin hood a perfect cylinder.
And his lower lip split 
from hiking in the Mojave
all Easter week.

So, he said, he wrote to praise God
and for tobacco money:  
though smoking with that lip
must have been pain.  There were
three errors, he said, that raced him
from boyhood to the grave:
one of them was smoke.
Another was not living somewhere
godforsaken enough.
The third he kept under that
early-broken field now turned to dust.