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?