Commencement Day
The email, a last leap for glory,
calls for 117 of them
to meet to pray at sunrise
at the lake by Humanities Hall,
the two sawed-off trunks
and the rowboat overturned ashore
the seating for the earliest risers.
Only three show up: the RA first
with his psalm book, staking out
one trunk, the surfer in torn jeans
and his twin sister parking
half-awake on the dirt and rubbing
back sleep. The RA almost shouts
to hear his voice skim the water,
but smiles, combs the hair
he slicked carefully in the mirror
and without speaking, calls off
the prayer. His name on the email
that went mostly untouched,
he follows the flashes across
the top of the lake and knows,
one more time, that stillness is right--
that the campus has slipped
beyond the urging of his words
and fingers, the other 115
now in the havens of separate rooms,
the morning with no plans but picked-at
brunches and private jubilations.
Sighing, beaming, he extends his arms
before the lake and lets the wind
rush through. The twins shrug
and toss their Bible in the truck
but linger, the glinting sun
and water still promising something--
some ecstasy or transformation,
some chunk of grace stolen
from this hazy morning they set
their alarms to see. They find it
in the rowboat, its bent spine
that juts up toward the sky
like a muscle flexed defiantly
through the smashed paint and rust.
From her pocket, the sister
draws a single silver marker.
Her brother’s turn is first.
Passing the pen back and forth,
they scrawl their names and birthdate,
then spatter the hull with the record
of their imagined last four years:
the red-eye flights they passed on
now taken for posterity, the offices
not run for now chased and won,
this very lake ravished day
after day each season, the eyes
missing study for the swells at dawn.
With a coffee cup’s tap, they bless
the boat. Their still-waking muscles
turn it over and push. Through the water,
it cuts a sharp, steady path, the surface
closing behind it, erasing the seam.
Published in The First Thing Mastered (Tebot Bach, 2013)