The Good News
by Brit Washburn
The good news, my son says,
is that it seems to have self-
cauterized, referring to the slash
he’s seared in his thigh
with a radial sander
on the construction site
where just last week he shot a nail
through the back of his hand, missing
the bone by millimeters, confirming all
really is relative, could almost
always be worse.
We cannot, according to Einstein,
solve our problems with the same
thinking we used to create them, but maybe we can
mend a wound with the tool that inflicted it?
Or at least its near neighbor:
Out walking in Wildwood Park,
a friend picks a stem of jewelweed,
splays its end, presses the salve
into a sting on my daughter’s shoulder.
The world may be an accident
waiting to happen, but so, too,
might there be antidotes everywhere—
In the picture he sends, the skin is singed
black but not bleeding, the healing
already begun. I run a finger
over the childhood scar
on my own leg, in exactly the same place,
wonder at the coincidence of it, how,
despite our best efforts, history repeats:
random, orbital, the variable speed
removing material efficiently,
insensitive to the grain.