AN IRREGULAR ODE

Thirty days shy of forty,

 on a rush-hour-crowded Coney-Island-bound F train,

 I questioned the exact circumference of the sandy circle

 in which the Children of Israel wandered for forty years.

Forty years.

Were desert environs so sundry as to provide a passable

 facsimile of farther & farther? Of progress rather than round

 & round? How can we help but forgive them their myopia?

 (Though I know that isn’t the right term for what ailed them.)

——

Rangi McNeil is a native of Laurinburg, North Carolina. He earned a BA in history from Rice University and his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. He is the author of Occasional Poems and The Missing.