Something Beyond This World

The yolk floats in the egg,
The whole inside the shell.
It takes a fine needle
To pierce the shell and white

And stab into the yolk
Without cracking the shell,
Without spilling the world.
The yolk puckers inward.

The needle delivers
Dye, medicine, new genes,
One first cell of new life,
Something along those lines.

Think of all the people
Who profess to pollsters
That they’ve experienced
Something beyond this world.

The Long Afterthought

Any decades lived past adolescence
Amount to Frost’s long afterthought, although
It’s got nothing to do with leadership,
As young Frost, valedictorian, thought.

Of course, Frost the valedictorian
Had yet to live any long afterthought,
Which doesn’t necessarily include
Regret, either. It’s just in its nature,

As long afterthought, to reconsider.
Many readers have reconsidered Frost,
The ratio of cornpone to dark rum,
How much of the rum was made molasses,

And whose actual down-home sufferings
Underwrote consumable afterthoughts.

Not What You Thought

You’re becoming a modest connoisseur
Of every day’s unexpected events,
Charming, destructive, merely unforeseen.

If you don’t just absorb them but notice—
Someone else changing plans, a stop for lunch,
A fraudulent charge on a credit card—

Little twists that reshape the arcs of days
But that tend to get absorbed, folded back—
Plans only delayed, new card in the mail,

A memory of a lunch half-recalled
Maybe once during small talk, years later
If ever—ordinary days fill up

With these turns, not just the ones that raise storms
With their butterfly wings, the boring ones
And the annoying ones soon forgotten.

But as you fall asleep, whatever end
Your waking hours reach, now you think how much
Of each next day’s unimaginable.