Three
Alison Stine

Do not mistake the sign.  If you watch
for long enough, you know.  No barrel
roll, no sheet of smoke pulled back
to show the constellation of smashed cars,
shed gears, streaked mud.  No.  Quick,
clean, Dale Earnhardt veers left, then
right, right into the wall of Daytona.
One hundred thousand honeycomb
the chain link fence and wait for him
to walk away.  He doesn’t.  Soon
his number skulks on bumpers, truck
cabs, T-shirts, hats.  New silence
in the third turn.  The fans raise three
digits.  And in spring, when a goat is born
in Florida with dashes on its black coat,
the lighter fur branching to a figure—
no one mistakes this, either.  Three is Babe
Ruth’s number, but we don’t remember
or want to, the number of shot presidents,
celebrity deaths, the age of my friend
Aimee’s sister when both of them died
in a Lexington creek.  For days, my parents
said nothing.  Then the girls were pulled
out, death-made heavy, their thick hands
threaded in roots, holding the weather,
holding like we used to paper fortune tellers,
fingers folded under.  Ask me: what is it like
to not know, then know?  That sudden, that
sure, the shaking head of the doctor come
to tell the microphone, the camera crews,
the fans: all of these things are true.