“Statistics are human beings with tears dried off,” 
Paul Slovic, Washington Post, December 22, 2020
 
Introduced to Statistics, she learned confidence levels,
uncertainties, deviations. Thought how thin 
the surgeon’s blade, the fading line between road
and ditch in a blizzard. What measure for pressure
of the knee on the back of the neck. The overstated 
efficacy of condoms. When the word hack rode
horseback and the meteor fell slantwise. 
 
After studiousness, work. Discussing Hamlet’s
suspicions with teenagers. Love – and vagaries
of facial recognition. Seeking to grab edges
like remnants in a dream journal. Beside a man
jeering fumbles in the end zone. Rewinding
counterclockwise with mind-benders
over lichen on Lake Beautiful’s boulders. 
 
Middle age’s boundaries: fingering
selvage between weft of action and warp
of reflection. Frayed blanket pardons.   
Shadows spill from memoir’s lies
and truths over a plateau of pitted values.
 
And running to the finish line, that moving
target that sports a yellow tape of extinction
as modeling speeds up bills coming due,
its splintered credit card, and the waitress limps
when slushy meltwater laps at sodden boots.
Forgiveness seems simpler than being forgiven or
writing the story of a wounded woman trying 
to throw caution at a headwind. Loyalists
morph into browbeaters and she cannot assign
her headache a number between 1 and 10, 
but views the brilliance of goodness 
through cataracts, starry-eyed
where storytellers know no borders.