Faith At Cub Scout Camp I lost the card that said I was a Wolf or Bear. I begged my mom to drive me back to find that scrap of paper. How I prayed and wept, and Mom, a woman I know now not given to attention of others’ prayers, being grimly caught up in her own supplications, drove me back. It lay there, fluttering on the path, where God had promised. I was good for a month. Epiphany In Kansas, brooding about breaking up with Sandi before we got to French kiss, I wandered out on a deeply cold day with my old .410. I killed no rabbits, but walked home on creek ice, a secret path through that wilderness of stretching white fields. I walked on water, thinking in summer this is the way the turtles saw the world. Suddenly, for no apparent reason I found myself so clever and handsome. The Teacher My father-in-law and I were sweating, lashing some antique chair on my van’s roof. He kept giving lessons in knots. Finally, I said, in effect, he didn’t know shit. I recall since it was the first time I dared say it and the first time he took it, standing there holding one end of my rope in his big meat hook hands, me, arrogant nobody who had stolen his daughter. Knowing Too Much He came to visit, my old man, he who once could slam any man’s arm down hard on the beer-stained tabletop. Four wives had sucked at his success and left him a husk. When I drove wild down our winding roads, this pilot who had nursed Gooney Birds across the Hump, broke bread with Chou and the Flying Tigers and Earthquake Magoon who had bought the farm over Dien Bien Phu, held no hard, knuckles white. Somehow, he was afraid. For the hot shot he had been, for the man I would never be enough to be, I throttled back, leveled off and plotted a course for home. Mark DeFoe is Chair of the English Department at West Virginia Wesleyan College. His latest book of poetry, Aviary, will be published this fall by Pringle Tree Press. His poems have appeared in Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry, Yale Review, The Literary Review and elsewhere.