it is sometimes best to see circles where you have been taught to make frames

Which is the very salt of patience. I misunderstand the direction of syllables. When I walk into rooms, she is scraping a fork across the surface of a plate, laboring to produce a porcelain zest. Her feet are labored, her eyes labored, those thoughts that pass between the kitchen sounds are labored. And I am tempted to paint the scene, of course as a historical painting because those are the most important, but I am relegated to the pastoral or the realist genres. Or else a mosaic, repeated shades of labored colors. On this margin, you are directed to think of motherhood, new, unbroken, still pushing everything out. On this margin you are directed to the waning days of a prison sentence, a clean room, a library book, fantasies of stripes and chain gangs, roof-work and highway construction, the digging of ditches that serve no purpose. A clean room. Well lit. A toilet. And a window in the door. But the center. The center is a question. A demand. A word you forgot to hear, or you woke in the middle, or fell asleep at the end of it. And when I sit down to tables, she is placing salt--heaping it--in front of me. It is the very best sort, I can hear myself pretending to lie, but in fact I believe it.