By Jack Myers

Featured Art: Houses of Parliament, London by Claude Monet

I thought of my soul as something like a scent,
like an air of kindliness. That my selfish heart
would grow enormous in battle. I thought I could help
the troubled because I was troubled. I wanted my humility
to be large, to float like a balloon above the parade I was in.

But you know how it goes. My epic turned out to be
a miniature self-portrait painted on a brick from a wall
in me that had fallen in. My oxen were small as bugs.
My arrows that I imagined shredding the sky like black rain
in a Japanese ink print melted back into brushstrokes.

So it’s good to feel small once more, to bow at the end
of a long line of becoming everything again. No more
struggling to fit in after wind-light sweeps me up or a dying
ember takes me in as easily as I thought my life should have been.

Or maybe what’s next will be harder or nothing or I’ll be
totally surprised without there being a me. I always felt like
that anyway. But the place in me where all of this is missing
has turned sacred over time. That’s the best explanation I have
for why we aren’t allowed to know even the simplest things.