My mother was burning in a closet.

Creek water wrinkling over stones.

Sister Damien, in fifth grade, loved teaching mathematics.
Her full white sleeve, when she wrote on the board,
Swayed like the slow movement of a hunting bird,
Egret in the tidal flats,
Swan paddling in a pond.

Let a equal the distance between x and y.

The doves in the desert,
Their cinnamon coverts when they flew.

People made arguments. They had reasons for their appetites.
A child could see it wasn’t true.

In the picture of the Last Supper on the classroom wall,
All the apostles had beautiful pastel robes,
Each one the color of a flavor of sherbet.

A line is the distance between two points.

A point is indivisible.

Not a statement of fact; a definition.

It took you a second to understand the difference,
And then you loved it, loved reason,
Moving as a swan moves in a millstream.

I would not have betrayed the Lord
Before the cock crowed thrice,
But I was a child, what could I do
When they came for him?

Ticking heat, the scent of sage,
Of pennyroyal. The structure of every living thing
Was praying for rain.