Perhaps the trouble started with number two,
though the other 998 lovers didn’t help.

You are a pat of butter,
a solid golden square between two papers.

You look down the barrel of a french roll
stretching mile after mile into the horizon,

wondering how you’ll spread from here to there
as the hot knife digs into your back. At night you

work by candlelight, calculating how to pay off
a thousand credit cards by the 15th of next month,

what to get 72 kids for their birthday this week,
your ears aching from 200 boom boxes down the hall.

You fantasize about hopping in the Ford Explorer with a full tank,
pointing the bumper toward Lebanon and not looking back.

But kings can’t get away. When the border guard
sees that passport photo with the crown it’s all over.

So, in the wee hours of the morning you write books:
all those wise sayings you wish you had lived by,

that love song for number thirty six,
and finally, the one that keeps saying "all is vanity."

Reprinted from the winter 2004 issue of Spectrum magazine, and previously published in The Christian Century, April 10–17, 2002

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