Somewhere beneath the sky’s enormous lack of comment,
I suspect there’s a soft-palmed ghost out there
crouched at the bottom of a fence,
where it picks wool off the barbs one tuft at a time.

I think about that ghost on Sundays
when ninety-nine clean shirts go looking for’m.
They sleep in matching flannels on high-thread count sheets.
They each own a label maker and a drawer where the batteries actually are.
They walk in skips with parted hair and hallmark joy,
all rinsed and rested since nothing woke’m up at three
and four was out bothering someone else.

They’re good. I’d let them watch my kids.
I'd let them buckle’m into their minivans
and drive them to a room full of light
to sing about the hands that hold the world.

I just wouldn’t let them think those hands are clean.
Because they’re not. They’re busy.  They’re bloody.

One hand is out at the fence holding the wire,
the other is steady beneath the animal’s jaw, saying easy, easy.
Both are doing the heavy lift of touching a frightened thing
without becoming another reason it gets scared.

I know because I’ve been there.
Touched when my wool was crusted in cheap merlot and bloody knuckles.
I was the sweater nobody would donate,
and yet the Keeper of the Black Sheep wore me around town.

Thank you for that.

Thank you for cheating.
For putting your thumb on the scale after inventing the weight.
For writing the rights of cold physics and Darwinian bookkeeping
that turn the limping into lunch,
only to dismiss them completely at the first sight of the black sheep.

A lesser god would have padlocked the field and kept good books,
red pen behind the ear,
striking the cracked ones from the inventory,
sweeping me into the valley of dry bones with the rest of the shards.
But you are kneeling among the glass, glue in hand.

You leave the gate unlatched on the far side of the field,
the side with the wolves and the bottle caps,
where you oil the hinges
and walk in when everyone with sense is walking out,
like a firefighter or a mother or a fool.

And you search for me.

Not like a cop,
but like a tongue goes looking for the missing tooth,
returning and returning to the gap,
long after the rest of the mouth has learned to eat without it.

The Keeper keeps coming for:

the new dad sweating through his third night of withdrawals.
the girl who hitchhiked to Tulsa with eight dollars and a theory.
the lifer who makes a joke at the exact spot where he could have been known.
the impulsive who texted the wrong person at 3 a.m.
with a heart that was right and a thumb that was drunk.

I don’t have a name for you beyond Keeper.
I used to, but then they used it and the steeple
to point fingers and leave all the drunks behind.

I don't know if you wear sandals or sweatpants,
go robe or Carhartt on your days off,
if you write your name in Hebrew
or just leave it like frost on a windshield:
gorgeous, unreadable, gone by noon.

What’s still here of my theology is a bruise I keep pressing to see if it still hurts,
and a sunrise that breaks me open every morning anyway.

What’s left of my certainty is this:

You work the night shift as a union of one,
headlamp on, coffee gone cold in a thermos dented
after being dropped on every bad road we ever ran down.

Your pockets are stuffed full of black wool.
The grease of it still on your fingers.
The salt of all our fevered going.
A burr still caught in the cuff.

Back behind the barn, you keep a lost and found box:

a tooth from a bar fight in Duluth,
a hospital bracelet with the name spelled wrong,
a set of car keys somebody finally took away from me,
the shoelaces they took from me at intake,
a cigarette I bummed in a parking lot at the exact moment I needed a stranger,
three first-day coins from three first days,
a love letter I never sent and should’ve,
a guitar pick from the last good night before the bad ones,
the eight dollars that girl was carrying to Tulsa,
the baby monitor that kept a man alive through the sweats
because every time it crackled he remembered he was somebody's dad.

You don't throw anything away.
I think that's my whole religion now: The Keeper keeps it all.

And if I get well enough to forget the sound of somebody coming back for me,
if I start discussing the lost as though I’ve never been the reason for the search,
if I become a clean shirt discussing what the dirty ones ought to do:

Immediately roll the windows down.
Let me hear the gravel break.
Let me watch the headlights move slowly past the ditch.
Let me be embarrassed by love all the way back
to the tenderness you keep slipping underneath my locked doors.

The Keeper of the Black Sheep
16×20, Ink and Charcoal on a Framed Canvas