The envelope was plain.
Verdicts don't need decoration.
My name, a case number,
a date by which to answer.
And the boy is back on the carpet,
collar buttoned wrong,
while the headmaster, pipe smoke and gnarled arthritic fingers,
grades him like fruit:
second-rate student, and always will be,
as if always were his to give.
My aunt, who was also my teacher,
years earlier, had sown the fruit of self-doubt
standing at the front of the room,
chalk in her hand, thirty faces turning,
saying for all of them to hear:
You know less than nothing.
At nine I tried to picture it,
a number below the bottom of the board,
the shame within the hole that I needed to crawl into.
The others learned something that day too:
which desk to scorn at.
Forty-seven years of hands on skulls,
of reading the anguish behind eyes,
of signing my name to other people's prognoses,
and I thought each gratitude
was another brick in the healing.
It turns out I was building
a longer staircase
down to the same hole.
Now strangers in a conference room
will decide what the paper on my wall is worth,
and the boy says I told you so.
He has been waiting,
he knew the schedule.
He knew that sooner or later
the truth of origin would emerge.
The sacred texts tell me ayin
is where the world begins,
the nothing God speaks from,
a place where even God is hidden from Himself.
Maybe.
But God was not nine,
and His aunt did not stand at the blackboard
making Him the lesson
for thirty other children.
I don't know yet what they'll take.
I know what can't be taken:
the heads I held, the things I heard.
Let them count me.
I learned my arithmetic from experts:
less than nothing,
second, always.
It took a lifetime to learn the rest,
that a man can be found wanting
and still be found.
