Fundamental Attribution Error

I am thankful my ears

merely ring, that they are

not two pilfered slips

of marble discovered

in the glove compartment

of the newest employee

of the Museum of Ruin,

whose fetish to speak

softly into stone he did not

disclose on his application.

If his manager were a kind

person—and what person

who for a living catalogs

ruin isn’t at least patient

with imperfection—

he would be kinder than

the part of me that imagines

how this story’s trajectory

involves squad cars and any

of several ways the thief

winds up with a banshee

in his brain, a phrase

that tastes decidedly unlike

the dirt that filled first

the mouth and nostrils

and then each of the thief’s

ears when the police mashed

his head repeatedly into the ground.

They thought doing so was just

the beginning of retribution,

which is a kind of justice common

but ill-suited to human existence.

To the thief, whose brain

would soon start hissing

the word criminal at the image

of itself hanging in the mirror

on the barnacled wall

of its one room, the brutality

was as much inevitable as it was

an opportunity to say good-

bye to the endless and unwearied

stones inside the earth, to feel

in the ground’s looseness

how they had already begun

to forgive him. That the world

will not forgive him should be

obvious. See the way it lets

the word criminal persist inside

him for the span of time

it keeps him away. If you want

to imagine it, imagine

permanent orange internal lightning

imagine him entering the thicket

of trees just behind his mother’s

house (where else do you think

he’d live?), imagine him

digging in the dirt there

for a rock to talk to.

Imagine him working by hand

whole feet down without

uncovering a single stone,

just mounds of soil

and the trench his desperation

built. Imagine the volume

having watched her son

slip into the greenery

for the purpose of she knows

not what, and how the bleating

thing that fills her then is her

wonder at how deep into

the trees her son must go

before she can say he’s gone.