Poem: Soft strips of chance

*

In school he'd liked epigrams
and the way they could heave the most
unruly experiences into sums
that however simplified were not reduced.

A problem -- his own
work had never hooked the heart
of a distant person
caught up in shared hurt.

No poem was ever meant
to stand closed, intact
and pointlessly eloquent
but his did in fact.

But no. There was a cloud
of consciousness, like a chamois
cloth filled with wettest graphite, that stood
above the poem pulsing freely:

the ex-
ternal force of readership
that would flex
itself loose from an author's grip.

Around any willed object the abyss
of chance bit into that will -- but beyond
that abyss, in an almost mirrored place
a new consciousness took its stand.

So if he wrote well
(an "if" never proven)
that wellness might not be sterile,
if the reading were yet to happen,

and the randomness in
which writing lay
were a sort of moat beyond which recognition
slowly moved its eye.

In chance if there is chance there is no "unlikely"
or "impossible" -- there is no reasonable bet
you can just place over the sway
of its indifference to your plans for it.

And if this thing is wielded
by intention, why pretend you conceive
so awesome a Godhead
that just permits you to believe?

What surrounds us feels like destruction
but what surrounds
destruction feels more like creation
in its black and stylish bends,

this movement of time like a shiver that recurs
in a patterned way and seems as willed
in its careless spinning as a dancer's
pirouette through reality's perilous fluid,

a locus
of order, or of a world's slow
coming to order -- both perilous and conscious --
that seems suitable also

to be the stream down which poetry might flow
in fear of being devoured
but also -- or as though also
in a longing simply to be read.

For if he had traveled too far from
epigrams to return to their closure
still the Lord -- of epic and epigram --
stood nearer than ever -- in his fear.

*