The Trick

What is the provenance of you?

Were you ladled steaming out of hydro-carbon stew into a cradle?

Or did you pop into all this from the abyss – with the hiss

that frozen words-made-flesh, fresh from frigid nothingness,

must make when they encounter air?

And who are those two, looking at us with reluctance?

Is she the other’s mother? What meanings ought we to inductively

construe about their purple-orange hair – what do the changeful

hues of what they wear suggest about why we are here

and they are there? What is their news? What is news?

What is elemental? Points-of-view we take as sentimental

often are the ones we like the best.

They stir us into place: let us rest in their embrace.

Mommy loves her daughter or her son;

her daughter or her son loves her.

Unless it isn’t mommy but a metallurgic engineer, costumed

like Jane Eyre, to whom her wild suspicious lover, shorter

than a child, menacingly clings, waiting for us to advance.

Unless they’re what they least inarguably are – like us,

the chance detritus from a shattered star. But let’s not carp

or wail. Let’s opt for points-of-view that tell a gladsome tale.

There! That was satisfying,

wasn’t it? Doesn’t that regale?

It doesn’t, does it.

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