Gym

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2008 by Fagan, Aaron

There is safely around the smell of coffee and laughter.

And a story so simply told it sounds like our story

Like your life, a lie you made up as you went along-

Until it stopped working, and then you are the hair

Arrested in the shower and won't wash down the wall.

And it's puzzling in the purest sense of puzzling to you

Inspiration comes in with a dusty tool bag and leaves.

And you wear that "What the fuck?" expression you have

Every time you experience an aspect of relativity like this.

Everything and nothing infinitely like something and never

Left to be what it is or would become begins to sound

Like math for peace-if you just took an involuntary breath

Of hope and surrendered even more to what happens next

And everything you can't imagine after that, with love.

And that is when we doubt and say you'd have to be dead

Or free. The storyteller tells us only our idea of who

We are is dead. And that we are all our own religion.

AARON FAGAN is the author of Garage (Salt Publishing, 2007). He is a copy and research editor for Scientific American and lives in the Bronx.