Good Enough
No trumpet.
No paper
with a name
and a seal.
No hand
through cloud.
Only morning.
Light
across the floor.
The kettle
clicking itself quiet.
This body.
Still here.
After all
it carried.
Love,
once mistaken
for judgment.
Silence,
for sentence.
Years
at my own door,
hat in hand,
waiting
for someone
to let me in.
Father.
Mother.
God
with his ledger.
The clean.
The lucky.
Nobody coming.
Only breath.
A pulse
under the skin.
Old grief
working loose.
A tooth
no longer
worth saving.
No case.
No debt.
No failed draft
of somebody else's
idea of a life.
This man.
The one
who lived.
The cup.
The window.
Morning
going on
without permission.
No acquittal.
No applause.
No final
understanding.
Only this
strange absence
of appeal.
Nothing left
to prove.
And the words,
still awkward
in the mouth,
still almost
too large:
good enough.
Not mercy.
Not pardon.
Something
harder.
Bread
on the table.
A stone
carried for years
set down
at last.
I am
good enough.
