Yesterday returning through the interstate
Traffic pipeline, rain, sleet, wind, and snow
Churned in the high country near Cedar City.
Past the Parowan gap the snow cleared, but
An odd phenomenon could be spotted
Directly over the highway mostly ignoring it:
Where the northbound low-front sheared
Against the southwest-bound high pressure,
Two lines of fast-moving clouds appeared
To mirror the traffic directly below them.
The cloud on the west hand, like the vehicles
In the west lane, streamed south rapidly.
Immediately next to it, and as thin, an eastern cloud
Raced just as rapidly north. Barely a gap
Divided them. The deep meaning of coincidence
Is this: it can’t be a coincidence except
That naming makes it so, and we don’t name
Anything coincidence that doesn’t feel to us
Like the unheimlich opposite of coincidence.
It has to look weirdly meaningful, potentially
Significant, for us to declare it incidental.
We protest too much. We give ourselves away
When we say that the clouds that sheared
In perfect parallel above the divided highway
Were a matter of mere coincidence. It’s that
Mere that gives us away, the same as when
We say the shadowy man in the bushes
About to leap out at us is only a lamppost.
We are rebuking ourselves for being ourselves,
The beasts whose instinct is to see the numinous
However often that instinct proves ruinous.
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