P.S

The end is not near. We’ve passed the end, and it’s so far back
it’s like the tit of a cow in a field of poppies, a dot in a field

of many dots in a painting a myopic man is straining to see
in a village museum near a city we’ve never been to

nor will. It’s so far back I can’t remember the exact
moment of it, the way I didn’t see the curve ball coming,

the one that clipped my left hip as I swung the bat,
missing and not being missed. It’s the part of the eraser

worn down to the black metal band, the one that left
hideous gashes in the page of the test the math teacher

sprung on us, so many equations without solutions,
numbers that divided like soldiers on a reconnaissance mission,

then divided again. It’s in the back of the closet
in the box of Thank You cards I put stamps on

and never sent. It’s that last conversation,
the staccato of conjunctions that kept each noun at bay,

the one that wound down to the luxury of nonspecifics—
the possibility of or, the horror of but, the delusion of and.

It passed me by, the way beauty, like disease,
has been known to skip a generation.