Notes on Borrowed Wisdom
by Ken Hines
I.
Better a dry crust with tranquility
than a house full of feasting and quarrel. Proverbs 17:1
Birthday
Every year she makes a fancy cake, as though the child
were still here. She can see him even now, wide-eyed in the dining room
awaiting the lighted cake, each candle bearing its tiny halo.
What odd alchemy to turn sugar, flour and egg into joy. Her husband
is cleaning out the gutters today. No need for all this, he says.
As she folds orange zest into chocolate ganache, she can see her husband
through the kitchen window. He is standing on a ladder, one work boot
raised above the rung as he leans, stretching for something just out of reach.
McDonald’s
Starlings breakfast in the parking lot beside a rain soaked table.
The man sits alone, staring. He stuffs the last hand-warmer down
his shirt, lets his fingers thaw themselves around a large coffee. Every day
it feels like he’s farther from shore. The woman he calls Princess
is here again, cocooned in a grimy blanket two tables away, a scavenged
Egg McMuffin in a mittened hand. She looks up at him, smiles, ducks her head,
flicks a hunk of biscuit onto the blacktop. What would it be like,
he says almost aloud, to seize it and vanish with a few flaps of your wings.
II.
The heart knows its own bitterness
and no stranger shares its joy. Proverbs 14:10
St Kevin
At the mouth of the cliffside cave, foot braced on a crag, he hauls up
the rope, arm over serpentine veined arm, five fathoms of it
dangling a leather bundle that swings above the lake like a censer.
Drawn to the cave’s emptiness, he’d turned his back on the abbey’s
monks. Yet they pulled the curragh’s oars across the deep to his
hand-hewn lair—wise men bearing weekly gifts. Cheese, brown bread,
salt fish. What need he of paltry routine, his soul now bared to the divine?
Cave-coffin his sanctuary. Lake fog his incense. If anything is holy, everything is.
Craniotomy
On a gurney rolling to surgery, watching a stream of ceiling tiles
overhead, the man is startled by a faint echo of prayer. If I should die
before I wake. How does this residue still soil my mind, he wonders.
Fantasy of folded hands and pajamaed knees beside a narrow bed.
I pray the Lord my soul to take. His body, defending itself from the cold,
shivers, clenches fistfuls of sheet. Stopped beneath lights bright enough
to pierce flesh, he feels strange hands shift his head with infinite care. He blinks,
tries to focus, ashamed his faith in nothing has forsaken him at last.
III.
Those who guard their mouths preserve their lives,
those who open wide their lips come to ruin. Proverbs 13:3
Appointment
The man edges into the corner of the psychologist’s couch
snatching a pink pillow from his back. On the middle cushion,
his wife, intent as a parishioner in church. He hears the doctor
spritz the air with clinical cant—self-disclosure, availability—
sees the shrink’s hands folded in her lap, purpled fingertips
moving out and back again in a slow clap that reminds him
of Sesame Street puppets telling kids they are not alone. What
do they want from me, he asks himself behind a granite smile.
Vocal
In the realm beyond time before she was born
she envied the way humans talk. Loved the fingerprint of sound
that is each human voice. The symphony of morphemes played by
puffs of air riffling through vocal folds. But now, as she waits
at Delta Gate 2B straining to hear them call her flight, she misses
that quiet time just beyond memory. When knowing was shared
by all being. Unlike here, where it’s handed out to certain selves
like shuffled cards at a poker table.
IV.
Cheating scales are the Lord’s loathing,
and a true weight-stone His pleasure. Proverbs 11:1
Well Water
The salesman sounds out cryptosporidium for the woman,
ignoring the dog raising a wary hindleg above his shoe.
She fans herself in the doorway of the mobile home,
turns the word over in her head. She can feel microscopic worms
on her tongue, can see her own body coffined in front of the church,
her dimpled cheeks now flat and cold. “How much for this filter?”
she wants to know. Rifling through her purse past grandbaby pics
and tissues, she wonders if she’ll like the taste of purity.
Whistleblower
Unseen but all seeing from her desk in the catacomb
of Claims, she knows enough to bury them all. Their names
emblazoned on directory, parking deck and door. Their eyes
ignoring her nodded hellos. If no one knows you, do you
even exist? She shoulders a sweater she keeps in a drawer,
slides a strand of gray hair from her eyes. Hovering
the cursor over Send, she feels like a Marvel hero reborn,
with the power to make herself appear.
V.
The crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold
but the Lord tests hearts. Proverbs 17:3
Mask
Thursday nights his teenager skulks toward the church steps
like a prisoner. The man watches as addicts file past his car
toward the meeting room, silhouetted by a bulb above the door.
He leans against the headrest, feels his eyes close. With his next breath
the parking lot becomes a little league diamond. The bucket seat,
a lawn chair. His son scrambles onto the field, slides the catcher’s mask
over a half-blown bubble. Infield floodlights swarm with brown
bats skydiving in their wild erratic paths, never looking back.
Empty
A girl with raspberry hair taps his shoulder the way you touch
an iron to see if it’s hot. Perched on a folding chair, the boy hugs
his knees like a life ring. Handmade posters stare down at him
from yellow basement walls. Easy Does It. Turn It Over. Grow Or Go.
She wants to tell him her name. But he is pushing through the crowd
of women and men joined in intricate handshakes and smothering hugs.
At the doorway he stops, a foot on the threshold. To be unseen
was all he ever wanted, to be emptied at last of himself.
A 2021 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Ken Hines has written poems that appear in AIOTB, Ekphrastic Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and other magazines. His poem “Driving Test” won the Third Wednesday Journal Annual Poetry Prize. All this scribbling takes place in Richmond, Virginia.
