Meeting Someone On-Time

Can you synchronize
Your roll to the car,
Loading yourself in,

With your arrival
Just when expected,
No more and no less?

You can, but you can’t
Without a measure
Of good fortune, met

Along the tale’s path.
Luck is a compact
Way to sum them all,

The correlatives,
The field equations,
The endless impacts—

Large but far away,
Local and constant
But also minor, small.

Luck is your context
Sum-totaled, is all.
Can you synchronize

You and your context,
Your plans with the ways
Things happen to fall?

Soft Clicks and Murmurs

The air around you
Has all that it needs to
Sustain breathing you
Until you need food.

Food’s the deal breaker,
Hard to get, easy to lose—
Thoughts you can pretend,
But food you must choose.

What does that make you?
Alive as you go.
Thereafter dead soon.
You spoon chicken soup,

Think of Max Ritvo
And his charming thought
That chemo sounds like
Someone making soup.

Eight Years On

That day you woke up
To realize you
Had outlived the wait—

In front of you sat
The box of answers,
Of different answers,

Not the old answers—new
Answers on offer,
The greatest reward,

Being their newness
Not their magnitude—
That day you woke up

Holding the answers
That threatened the world.

Rock Meadow

Grass like silk
In coarse weeds,
Nests spider

Softer dust.
What threats thread
Through these terms?

Again, you—
You made it.
O be you!