It Sure Beats Solitaire

“O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife…”
(Mercutio to Romeo, Romeo & Juliet)

Whose idea was mustard? That’s what I must know.
I never thought I liked it but it turns out hot dogs
really are improved by it! Anyway, it’s too spectacularly

gloomy, cold and damp a day today to look away
from any circumstance or thought – hot dogs, mustard,
February: every atom of a sensibility is providential,

surely: purely for one’s own amusement though
the manufacture of epiphany may be, it sure beats
Solitaire to interact with every singularity and find it isn’t

solely singular, but rather in a pact with – part of –
some eternally emergent matter/energy Niagara fall:
ah! – to feel the spray of each component of existence! –

and get wet: though, funny how one can forget
that everybody breathes and eats and drinks and
sleeps and wakes in every sub-atomic moment of it:

God’s in the detail? – well, honey, you’ve a whale
of reeling increments to sort through sleeting down
from this bleak glamorous late-winter February ceiling.

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When I was six, perhaps, or seven – in first grade,
or maybe second – I recall a brand-new classmate
moved up north from Florida: she had the sort
of silver-blond bright hair a fairy princess ought to have:

but like Queen Mab in embryo, she hadn’t yet absorbed
the art of understanding snow – and it was snowing
out the window on this February 1950s day: and
she began to sway, and cry: she’d never seen such stuff

ka-lump out of the sky. This is the moment I espy
inside when I see pregnancy of any real or metaphoric
kind: appalling imminence of birth into the body
or the mind: the shocking mark of every waking

and unprecedented moment on the Earth – when,
suddenly, you’re forced – again – appallingly – to watch
and care. A scare: like my delayed exposure to sharp
mustard on a boiled hot dog, but: it sure beats Solitaire.


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