Chance and Certainty

Years ago, something whispered to me in a car

on a dirt road in summer with someone beside me,

a boy, not you, who hummed to himself

as a chance thought hurried past and was gone.

The wind explains where the thought went,

air taking it up and over the windshield.

Chance took not just the thought that night

but the boy and the car and the life to follow.

Otherwise, he could have been you,

and I’d have spent years driving that car with its top down

on what roads I do not know and had what fights

and what lovemaking and the inevitable joining

of a political movement in a border country

and the flying low into war, until finally, by now that is,

the tending of a garden, the teaching and writing,

until it would turn out that in this life it hadn’t

mattered one way or another who sat behind the wheel

or where we headed, first with fingers on torn and windblown maps.

So if that was or was not you then perhaps she was or was not me,

leaving in doubt the present. I know only

that something passed once in passing

that may or my not have changed everything.

You would shake your head at this point, but luckily

you are busy down on the beach building a fire

to signal the seals to come ashore.

The children dressed all in green this morning:

wood nymphs and fairies and one Peter Pan.

With that story you will keep each other busy till noon,

giving me time to sit up here, waiting for some thought

to land upon me and leave my life changed.

The old washing machine in the room beside me

rattles on over-sudsing as usual,

clattering loudly and painfully to a stop.

I rise when it reaches its end. Full of bubbles

and business and words flying past—

these are my days, these are.

Like that memory of a night driving in the wind

with a boy who had to have been you,

for sometimes entire lives can be built on

such flighty and forgotten knowledge.