The crack in the windshield of my father’s gold Camry

used to be just a scratch no one noticed,

but somehow, like milkweed creeping up

among the tulips in my mother’s garden

it grew into a scar that slices the horizon

in two above Metcalf Avenue

where I am driving just to go fast, to be here now,

adrift in a reverie deep as the tunnel Alice tumbled down

into a life among Cheshire cats and queens.

I want to be like her, to chase adventure on a whim

with no worry that home will be any different from how I left it.

But every time I close my eyes for just a second,

the grass has grown, the paint has chipped,

the kaleidoscope has turned,

and I can’t get the pattern back.

Maybe change is always this way,

crystal beads jumbling in a tube

so quickly that to watch them fall

is to feel Earth rotating its crazy orbit

and to know that all we can do

is to breathe in slowly

and let ourselves ride the drift

like so much chaff in the wind.