chance

chance

…thinking is mostly

trying not to drown.

            Marianne Boruch

      from “The Great Ape House”

Is there a relief in their world, a warren

they shiver in, to watch a hawk slide her beak

into the warm cage of her prey, their sister?  Do they praise

whatever breath splits another hare?

Is almost victimhood like that?

So random, like the D-Day soldier who broke

down sixty years later but he's really in the thick

of it still, buddy in front, buddy behind

and then both very simply not? 

What’s the imbalance of random

chance, the coin’s fifty fifty and the way

the coin’s held, when the math of it

suddenly becomes shape, becomes speed,

so if it’s tossed from the tip of the thumb,

right against the wide nail it will be different

than if it’s sitting further back, if the arm jerks

involuntarily, a twitch of wind, and arcs

and speed are free to elbow their way in

to fair chance.  Maybe saying the word

reason (and see, just like that, just by looking

up I’ve lost it, what I was trying to see)

the hawk with her strip of hare

and all the throbbing eyes staring—the Private

on his way up the ranks completely

unscratched in flesh comes out broken,

in places like surrendering in the first place—how close

to acquittal it is when we’re in someone else’s hands.