More a tragedy that he has both
but no memory of what would turn out to be
the night of his last good day,
when he landed like a bad bet
on our front lawn, leaving pieces
of himself behind, perhaps as an offering
for what he disrupted: the unsullied order
of a still winter evening.
Headlights, fenders, rear view mirrors,
smashed and strewn across a tidy front yard.
Softer stuff: a page of a calculus test
with a red A at the top, a pack of condoms.
What we felt that night we kept to ourselves:
the horror of how easily a young life can break
mixed with guilty annoyance at losing a prized tree.
All we saw of him was a mess of curly hair
as he was pulled from his steaming, leaking wreck
like a doomed character in a Greek myth.
The sheared foliage told us he had been airborne,
so Icarus? But since he seems destined to live
the rest of his life plagued with obstacles,
maybe Odysseus, another guy
who got lost on his way home.
Smoky Quartz 