ACCIDENT ON ROUTE 67

A curve and too much speed, but not 
so tight and not so fast. A borrow ditch 
steep enough to flip four wheels, 
but wide enough to ease the spin. 
A truck route steady with eighteenwheelers, 
but not a single semi in sight. 
You spun. You flipped. You came to rest 
sideways hanging from the harness you did not 
forget to buckle. Alive. Unhurt. 

Whatever guides the trajectories of lives 
brought ours together, like paths 
of comets, or the orbits of binary stars, 
or the chancy soup of ancient seas 
that rolled a ball of protein into a sac 
of fat that learned to write poems 
and paint dreams. It could just as easily 
have taken you away from me. 

Kharma, fate, past lives, God's will, 
random chaos. All the woowoo 
voodoo we conjure up to explain 
the dying and the borning, intersections, 
coincidences, the aversions and attractions 
of the bundles of moments beaded into 
these inexplicable prayers of lives. 

I bow in humble awe that we found 
each other. It was the high price of land 
in Sweden. It was Baathist terror in Baghdad. 
It was a gallery of dreams. It was the broken glass 
of a poem. It was a war we both said No to. 
It was every twist and turn between. 
I bow in humble awe at how 
easily we could have lost each other. 

And I vow to love you with the wildness 
of my heart, the blood of my body, 
the water of my secret canyons. Let's laugh 
and bark together like crazy baboons, 
ride and hold tight to the wild horses 
of passion, and then lay, very still, 
in the common warmth of our bodies, our hearts' 
rhythms entrained to one pulsing beat. 

Here on this lonely planet 
in the black night of stars, we hum
in the resonance of spirits ordered from the random 
spinning of the universe. We breathe in 
breathe out, together in the timeless 
space between. We must not 
for one losing moment fail 
to thank and bless the simple chance 
we are given to love each other again.


© 2003 by Richard W. Todd

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