1. Inevitable
Nothing is. Not even
the old saw about death
and taxes was correct. You can escape the latter
through the former, and as for Death…well,
Death is just damn good. Hasn’t failed yet
on the most obvious level,
but he’s been missing a crucial opportunity
all this time. See,
an amoeba formed
at the dawn of life has managed to keep
some identity, somehow, by dividing often enough
to make the concept of individual death
less clear. There’s a man or woman,
or maybe a llama or a deer,
somewhere in Peru or perhaps Bonn,
who’s got enough sense
of origin inside to make it plain
that something has always survived,
and that something keeps spreading itself
around. When it goes at last
into the Big Light, Death will follow it there
and they’ll each have to concede
that if Death is inevitable,
then so is Life, until the day
when they prove each other wrong.
2. God
Boy, did we get this one wrong:
for one thing, God’s neither
infallible nor all knowing, and God’s
got no fingers in anything we care about,
famously saying once through a middle man
that he’s bored with the sound of our assemblies.
He (and I use the pronoun with the full sense
of how he’d snicker if he were paying attention)
spends far more time with dice than we think.
Everything’s a gamble to God — the free will,
the predestination, the mysterious ways,
the whole rigamarole we’ve established
to console ourselves as to what happens
as he pulls back, releases,
and waits for them bones to settle.
Which explanation we choose for the roll’s result
is left entirely up to us…exactly as we should expect
from a gambler who wears lucky socks
just to watch his dawn catch fire every day.
3. Peace
It doesn’t come from absence
but from presence.
It defines itself better
by commission than by omission.
We expect too much from it —
the instant it’s here, we agitate
for its continued existence, forgetting
that it lives for the moment
when we stop thinking of it
as an unusual, exotic creature
and let it graze on our lawn,
doing whatever it likes as long as it is
unenforced.
Dark Matter 