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On top of it all, I get called for jury duty—
just time enough to stop at the nursing home.
She smells fresh-bathed, her hair cut
at the nape as she’d never have worn it.
Asleep, as always, sometimes with her eyes
open. How can you tell if it’s a coma?
We rise for the judge; a woman.
It’s a case of damages:
16 year-old girl, speeding on gravel,
and now the other driver’s too weak
to heave vegetable crates onto the truckbed.
We go down the rows with our reasons
for not serving. I have mine:
department head trying to hire two tenure-tracks,
no subs for the classroom, guiding student research.
I think of those I can’t say: Mother lying there,
Ellen the lead in the high school play,
but offstage doubled with pain (they thought
it was a cyst, but the pain didn’t subside).
I think about rights, trial by jury, my right
not to serve just now (my doctor told me,
you need to take care of yourself—let some things go).
The others give better excuses: a woman
nursing a dying father; a plumber who’s torn up
someone’s bathroom; a severely retarded son;
unpredictable asthma. My excuses shrivel.
Still, the judge lets some of us go.
At my office later, more stale applications,
a note fuming about a donation unthanked-for,
a sheaf of unread papers. Junk email come-ons,
a list-serve dispute about whether a Jew
can teach Milton. In the late afternoon light
an apple slowly rots on the desk. I lock the door.
One stop at the cleaners and then home to shape
buns for the burgers. A yeast aroma as I walk in—
the machine has done its work. The cats gather
to whine for food. I look through the plastic
at the blouse from the cleaners. Once again
a note with the bill: “We did the best we could.”
Mother clasping the bedrail; Ellen lying,
heating pad under her textbook; my struggling students;
those jurors today; the guilty and the not.
I think of frescoes in Rome and Orvieto,
the martyrs in the mosaics. We do the best we can.
I remember St. Agatha, painted carrying her breasts on a tray,
sliced off for refusing her seducer—the scene misread
for centuries so that she became the patron saint of bakers.
We do the best we can. I give the cats their food,
stroke their fine fur, then shape the dough
into buns lined up in pairs on the pan.
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