antonomasia

Nobody in Luke calls him good.

I looked — King James, NASB, the Bible in the back of the pew, 

the one with my mother’s funeral program

still flattening a page in Proverbs.

He’s a “certain Samaritan.” 

And in that room the noun was already the joke,

the word you didn’t have to decorate,

the way you’d say a certain landlord,

a certain uncle at Thanksgiving,

a certain guy who drives that truck.

The good is ours. We screwed it on afterward

like a nameplate on a donated bench,

like the little card beside the painting

telling you how to feel about the horse.

And then Jesus asks the lawyer which of the three

was neighbor to the man in the ditch,

and the lawyer will not say it.

He that shewed mercy on him.

Seven syllables of detour

to keep one noun out of his mouth.

I’ve done this. At a table. Fork in my hand.

My cousin — well. You know how he votes.

She’s great, actually. For one of them.

He’s one of the good ones, which is a sentence

that has never once been about a person.

It’s always about the rest of them.

It’s a receipt you write yourself

so the exception clears the audit.

The good liberal. The good evangelical.

The good cop. The good immigrant. The good North Korean,

who I picture — God help me — holding a bag of oranges,

because the frame requires a prop

to prove the exemption.

And the two who crossed the road:

nobody preaches that neither of them was evil.

They were clean. They were busy.

They had a service at four.

Somebody was expecting them.

Meanwhile there’s a man on the shoulder of 71

with his hazards going

and I’m doing sixty-eight in the left lane,

already drafting what I’d tell you about him,

already the kind of man who thinks about the parable

instead of the shoulder.

The ditch doesn’t ask for the adjective.

It takes whoever climbs down.

In the mirror the hazards keep pulsing

orange, orange, orange,

smaller,

the way a word gets

when you decide not to say it.