Meditation at 6 PM, and: St. Dismas

Meditation at 6 PM

Of interesting things in the kitchen,let me remember these are not the least,

this water and this potato. Even leavingaside the familiar miracles of pipe

and pump and chlorine, the complex filteringsystem that lets me piss in the river

I drink from, let me note how water fillsthe Pyrex the way it does, quick blisters

into the cup, the very rush of it cloudingitself up, then settles, pours into a superlative

clarity through which I see grains of salt fallto the bottom of the pot. And let me consider,

as I scrub this potato with a potato-shapedbrush, how, though no potato is truly ovoid,

this one is like a pebble or old boiled eggin that none of the three should be eaten:

for this potato is green. But let me praise,while cream thickens over a low burner

and butter softens in its wax paper wrapper,how this potato grew in horseshit and kept on

growing all month in its bowl on the counter.Let me not throw it out; let me not think,

as I fold dishtowels into small soft squares,of vomiting or the gastrointestinal tract

but that in twenty minutes we’ll all be onlytwenty minutes older. Let me watch the pot.

St. Dismas

He’s patron of the honor block, good thief,the famous late penitent—and might you not,dwelling in the desert, also murder to rob?

Amen, I said, and signed up to teachat the supermax, Amen, but did not meantoday they should be with me in paradise

which is my backyard by the river not farenough from Dannemora’s wall, thirtyconcrete feet through the village the prison

built in mountains convicts mined. Hereis its post-office, here is its gas station,between them the wall. This road is closed

but here are the troopers, here are the dogs.The manhunt lasts three weeks and I am notJesus, I lock my doors until I hear one’s dead,

the other caught. Like anyone elsein the northern counties, I’ve seen the holein the steam-pipe and the smiley face

on the post-it note that read have a nice day,I’ve tried to imagine how naïveone might have to be to smuggle tools

or drive a getaway car or think it could notbe dangerous to be living in a place like this,bolt after gate after wall not unlike hell

in late medieval images of its harrowing—here is St. Dismas, holding his cross,while, like a common criminal, Jesus

tramples demons who might only be doingtheir jobs, the only steady middle classones they could get in that region of bare

storefronts and rocky farms. I don’t knowwhat makes a man kill a man—but eventhe river hates its dams. It floods that June:

fish flashed through my backyard’s grassand, as if this paradise were not provisional,the geese grew bolder every day.