Maybe the Messiah
Maybe the Messiah not coming is proof enough, Kafka chalks
across the board, that God exists. He’s subbing my eighth-grade
math class, but I’m still not convinced that multiplying negatives
equals a positive, or that anyone understands the evidence
of absence: the dark matter of my father’s murder; mother,
at home, reaching for the rotary, her spine quivering
like my oscilloscope’s needle. Maybe the Messiah can explain
how atoms once breathed out by Aristotle ended up in the algorithms
of A.A. Michelson as he measured the speed of light.
How fast must the superhero of myself travel to go back in time
to tackle the gunman or deflect the bullet that altered my family’s future.
But already the bell’s crying physics and Kafka’s screening the film
about the butterfly that caused the avalanche on the other side
of the world. It’s called the theorem of unintended consequences,
but you might know it better as just bad luck. Listen, Kafka says,
stop beating yourself up. And suddenly he’s clapping erasers
and flapping his arms like my mother demonstrating the myth
of the Messiah, or an angel disappearing in a storm cloud of dust.