The Accountant

For Don Jamieson & Leslie Epstein

This being Cambridge, he too

has read Herodotus (a minor

in Classics from Brandeis U.),

but now it's no longer the cycles

of history that move him,

but the more grounded questions

of whether to file married,

filing separately, or married,

filing jointly, whether to declare

one's home temporarily converted

to rental property, or domiciled

abroad, to partially depreciate

one's decline, or await the single large loss

of sale in a falling market. And then

a friend tells me studies have shown

accountants to be the happiest professionals,

forever working towards some tangible outcome

in a world already codified for them,

and I think again of my own scribe, Don,

reading the Oresteia in his quieter hours,

for no particular purpose beyond pleasure,

as he follows the unambiguous oracle

of his ordinary, happy occupation,

delighted merely to ponder the possibility

that things may yet add up to add up.