Among Competing Answers, Choose the Simplest by John Gallaher

I’m straightening up the house while Robin’s on the phone
with her brother who’s walking her through the steps
to find the arrest report of her other brother.  It looks like
it’s three charges this time, but one of them isn’t available
for viewing, which gets confusing, in the cacophony of birds
dissipating from tree to tree way, which is also a version
of that feeling you have when you aren’t having any feelings
in a situation in which you think you should be having feelings.
But numbness is also a feeling, as I’m looking things up
on the internet to try to help, even though I was just thinking
that’s a rather futile task.  If we refused every futile task, though,
we’d do very little in this life, I’m countering to myself,
as Robin and her brother are wondering if their brother
had been taking his medications and how that might’ve been
a part of it.  And haven’t we had this conversation before,
arguing against our current conception of empathy, that it’s
too easily swayed by individuals in crisis and not enough
by long-term goals?  It’s important that we follow the terms
of grief.  That we wrap the wound in gauze and pick up
our drums and flutes.  It reminds me of an episode
of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Riker gets turned into
a god, and loses his capacity for empathy, fried, as he was,
by the weight of his power.  Where do we start is the same
question as where do we stop.  Like most things, it depends
on your phrasing.  You campaign, as they say, in poetry,
and you govern in prose.  No wonder then, that people say
poetry is dead.  For years after my first divorce, I kept
my wedding ring on my keychain, as poetry, a reminder
of something, a negotiation with myself.  Some empathy.
I was never very specific regarding what I was supposed to be
reminding myself of, or negotiating.  I think maybe
I just didn’t know what to do with it, really, until one day
I was at work and someone stole my keys, wanting the ring,
to pawn or to, I guess, marry someone.  So then I got this
second lesson, a lesson about the surface-level reality of one’s
lessons, and I tell this story often because I think it’s funny,
though no one else ever does, which makes it even more funny.  

John Gallaher is the author of, most recently, In a Landscape, and, with Kristina Marie Darling, Ghost / Landscape. He lives in rural Missouri and co-edits The Laurel Review.