The crack in the windshield of my father’s gold Camry
used to be just a scratch no one noticed,
but somehow, like milkweed creeping up
among the tulips in my mother’s garden
it grew into a scar that slices the horizon
in two above Metcalf Avenue
where I am driving just to go fast, to be here now,
adrift in a reverie deep as the tunnel Alice tumbled down
into a life among Cheshire cats and queens.
I want to be like her, to chase adventure on a whim
with no worry that home will be any different from how I left it.
But every time I close my eyes for just a second,
the grass has grown, the paint has chipped,
the kaleidoscope has turned,
and I can’t get the pattern back.
Maybe change is always this way,
crystal beads jumbling in a tube
so quickly that to watch them fall
is to feel Earth rotating its crazy orbit
and to know that all we can do
is to breathe in slowly
and let ourselves ride the drift
like so much chaff in the wind.