coins in a Ball jar

coins touched by the hands of a

thousand now come to rest in a Ball

jar that sits on the edge of our kitchen

counter

it was the precarious position

i found it in – on the ledge like that -

that got me thinking of the man whose

face was the first i saw in this world

something of glass so close to falling,

so close to tumbling that i could feel

the descent of it in my lungs and i

could hear the shatter of it as it

struck the floor and i could feel the prick

of the shards on my fingertips and i could

smell the copper of the pennies and the

nickels and the quarters that rolled about

i don't know

it didn't fall, that's not what happened,

i'm just saying that i felt the heavy fall without it
going down, which is the way i approach darkness

i hate the idea of the fall, knowing that

it comes to all of us, but lately it's

come to too many of those i've known

in my life

it's that feeling of the dark figure that

descends, of a soul slipping downward

toward an ending, that has had me flailing

in my sleep lately

who would be so foolish as to place

a Ball jar on the edge like that? a child

i'm guessing, who went fishing for coin

and left it in that poised way, ready

the man who passed on yesterday was a

doctor and like i already told you, his was

the first face i ever saw in this world

when i emerged startled and blinking

once when i was 10 or so he had kids

take jubilant turns sitting atop an old

hand-crank ice cream maker at a church

fellowship lunch at their house in july

how the men filled 'round the canister

ice and salt while we took turns sitting

and laughing at the vibration of the crank

and the doctor sang hymns and laughed in kind

and that was a coin

or how he was the only man of god who

assured me that my sister was no pariah

when she got pregnant as a teenager while

the other men stood with cold stones in hand

and that was a coin

or how deftly he slipped the cord from around

my daughter's neck when she emerged

in a slick of blood, naked and pissing

everywhere, but scowling and full-throated

and that was a coin

i came outside on this november morning

to write a poem in the cool air but

this is no poem, so i went back to the

Ball jar that sat in a shaft of light on my counter

and i slid it away from its edge, the weight of

the coins a dense gravity and my fingers tingling

with the sense of an impending fall that did not come

to it but it came anyway, didn't it?

it always will