All You Know of What’s Next Is Whatever Your Past Hauls in With It

Maybe you still can’t predict that well,

Not as well as you’d like (you’re obsessed,

As a species, with predicting things

And will hazard predictions even

When odds are random, confidently),

But you come up with new refinements

Almost daily, and announce things, like

We can express just exactly how

Confident we should be whenever

We predict—which, let’s face it, amounts

To a precision confession. Can’t

Be confident, but we’re confident

We know our confidence intervals.

You’re hilarious. You have the past

That’s left to you, a.k.a., present,

And you use it like an expanding

Purse seine to trawl for your future prey

Or whatever you drag into it.