PROVERB

Somewhere between

the province of physics

and the quantum leap

of a first step is 

an agoraphobic inside

the straitjacket of his own

skin. He is on a crusade

to tame a tornado.

But he won’t leave the house.

He is like the inventor

who destroys in the afternoon

what he has made in the morning.

Like a river that thirsts its own water,

a tree that hungers its ripening fruit.

He will follow the cues and arrows

of his imagination, circumventing

nothing. Behavior’s misbehaviors,

standard deviations, grievings and shrivings

crowd him like wolves.

Then one morning…

indeterminate as an electron,

at the edge of tolerance,

with nothing left to read

but the scratchings of his own mind,

he will quiver with the knowledge that god is

the dice and the hand that throws them –

and he is that God.

He is a proverb

waking to its own wisdom.