Lava Point, 4 November 2017

Up at lava pond, a black beaver scampered
And a white horse cantered free of fences.
A woman with heavy dark hair stood there.
Her name is Samsara and sooner or later
She’s going to fix your little red wagon, she is.
Sooner or later, she’s going to settle your hash.
One day when I was seventeen and it was
Spring, blossoms and new mown grass, etc.
In the air, my future as bright as it ever cared
To get, she herself started in on me. I stared
Out of my dormitory window at the green,
And I put my God in a box because I wanted
To love her. I asked Him to do something
For me, which was to speak to me, to answer,
Anything He wanted to say, just so I knew it.
But nothing outside my own head was said.
I tried again, occasionally, and not with God
Or gods only. Here and there, I offered a dare,
An opportunity for something, anything
Supernatural, superhuman, or in any event
Nonhuman, to engage in conversation with me.
You will say I was obtuse and stubborn. I was
And I was, but I was hardly alone in offering
Prayers, making requests, or looking for signs
And omens in coincidences or the heavens.
It’s as human as talking to beg favor of the world,
Which was, in the end, what I came to: pure
Propositions put to the world as a whole,
The planet, the cosmos, the universe, the whole,
Assuming there was a whole and that it knew
Itself as such or some part of it knew and could
Answer for or even if not the rest. Whatever.
Still, the odd things dominated and the hope
For structured responses dimmed. Latterly,
I’d come to be numb enough to ask only
That the numbers, the nonmiraculous odds
Of those meaningless fairies, the numbers
Agree with me when I most desperately
Needed them to agree. That would be
Miracle enough for me. By way of response
I got my own dreams served to me in my head
On a platter, garnished with irrelevant surprises,
A pretty day at altitude in November, a black
Beaver waddling into the rushes, slap of tail
And then gone, a marvelously solitary,
Unsaddled, unbridled white mare in the fields
Of dry grass beside that beaver pond, crossing
The road behind me, then accelerating
Into a trot that looked like a break for freedom
Over the broken fences into the aspens.
Yes, it was all lovely but it was not symbolic,
Not predictive. It answered no prayers,
And still I can see her standing there, face
Hidden in her extravagant dark hair.