There’s a talent to repetition. A willingness to let the task
become again the only point and the mind funnel down
to the whole that must come from within to be real. Like
how Brunelleschi would slide off Ms. Wood’s perfectly
sculpted lips in the best Italian she could manage
as she drew perspective lines on the chalkboard
to show another fifth-grade art class how the Renaissance
mastered the illusion of forcing depth onto a flat plane,
orthogonals receding to a single point to either convince
the eye of dimension or draw it to the intended interest,
as in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper leading inevitably
to the face of Christ centered in illumination below
the coffered ceiling and between his apostles grouped
six to a side in symmetry. An insight as lost to us
as we sat there and longed for the greening fields beyond
the school parking lot as how Jared Stevens’s father
had been fired a few months ago from the sawmill
after getting caught drunk for the third time in two weeks
to relieve the monotony of forklifting logs to the head
saw, and how when Jared arrived home that evening
he’d be told the family was moving to the deserted
one-room shack between Nathan Williams’s pig farm
and the dead animal pit because the bank had repossessed.
the next day, because we’d all gone there on our bicycles
to escape our parents’ gaze, and later in high school
