In the Neighborhood Between Hope and Nothing, Utah, 26 March 2017

I couldn't help returning to the thought, what
If the world, the universe, is just exactly what
It seems to be? There is no unreality, only
The real; our perceptions aren't wrong, only
Limited, but sadly accurate as far they go.
Not that there would not be new discoveries
But the general tenor of the thing is fixed.
I picked a less-familiar stream to sit by,
One flushed by recent snowmelt and rain,
Brown and foaming in the bright spring day,
One of those little rivulets fixing to carve
Its own canyon of gravitas eventually.
To access a spot with some cottonwoods
And shade, I had to cross a subdivision
Of beige houses and slip between the brick
Gates of a named neighborhood. One gate
Had an empty circle, head-high, showing
Sky on the other side, and the other gate
Featured the same bricked hole but with iron
Lettering fit into the circle, HOPE, the name
Of the neighborhood. Empty sidewalks
Petered out and then a gutted dirt trail
Led down to the stream. Power lines,
Brush, and new leaves bobbed and swayed
In the rising, falling, rising breeze. This is
It, I thought. There are no alternatives,
No heavens or underworld hells, no outsides
To this singular universe, coextensive
With itself, differentiating into the distance
In all directions and each direction time,
No explanation ever to be had as to why
This and not anything other than this,
Just this with no reason to be but it is.
If you don't like it, the best and worst
You can say of it: whatever muddy bit
Of ripple you are in it is part of it, and thus
In some aspect of itself contemplating itself
This universe doesn't much care for itself.
The stream burbled on, the sound shifting
Its pitch too slowly for my hearing to know it.