but not the whole trip and still arrive to your destination
two hundred years before your time:
421 (artists formerly known as) goosebumps.
But that’s just the fancy stuff.
Some of them came from simple facts—
it rains diamonds on Jupiter:
189 goosebumps.
Blood donors in Sweden receive
a thank-you message when their blood is used:
301 Nordic goosebumps.
One night in Ann Arbor, my friend,
still undiagnosed, could not uncurl her fingers
to strum her guitar, so she sang the chords instead.
It was the first time in my life I’d seen pain
become an instrument:
10 dozen goosebumps
for each and every note plucked
from the string section of her refusal to silence
her dream. After that, nothing in the world was gray.
Even the movie of my past was released in color.
The oldest man in my hometown could not
get to the door to listen to our carols,
so we went inside and sang at his bedside instead.
Twenty-four boots on the front step
catching snowflakes with their tongues:
776 goosebumps.
At one point everything started doing it:
A sincere apology: 221 goosebumps.
An enemy’s love poem: 222 goosebumps.
The moon rising over the continental divide.
My girlfriend and I thought it was a car
driving off a cliff, and suddenly nothing
in the world was dying. You ever felt that?
A split second when nothing in the world is dying?
888 goosebumps,
and the next day I sharpened a tiny ax
so I could split the seconds myself.
Too much lives in a moment
to not feed it to the fire in the heart, slow.
A Missoula treehouse filled with candlelight:
143 goosebumps.
The octopus documentary:
54 goosebumps, multiplied by 8.
The biggest dog in the shelter
hiding behind a teacup chihuahua,
and the woman who came to adopt a cat
taking all three of them home:
1,012 goosebumps.
There is no escaping the magic now.
Beauty caught me and never let me go.
And the thing about the world record
is—if someone breaks it after me,
and they will break it after me,
I will love that so much
that without even trying,
I’ll break it again.
THE YEAR OF NO GRUDGES, OR
INSTEAD OF WRITING A FURIOUS TEXT, I TRY A POEM
I know most people try hard
to do good and find out too late
they should have tried softer.
I’ve never in my whole life
been levelheaded, but the older I get,
I’m more level-hearted—
and I think we make gods
who look like us for a reason.
I think, in spite of it all, we trust
we can be believed in.
When I don’t believe in myself,
I try to remember I have walked
on water, like, seven-hundred times
in Maine in the dead of winter.
Where I come from, you can drive
a pickup truck from one side
of the lake to the other, and people
have an unusually high quantity
of missing teeth and fingers,
but you can still count on them