Maybe it’s because my parents are getting older, but I’m beginning to see how a life can become filled with all sorts of chance events, momentary happenings that fall and drift like snow. As it turns out, some of these things that happen…well…you don’t notice them much, and, of course, they are too numerous to report; some of them you recognize as important from the get-go; and some of them take awhile to sink in, you have to look backwards in a mirror to see their meaning, to construct a story about how you got to where you got. Maybe you understand what I mean.
This poem emerged from thinking about my father’s diagnosis of melanoma and my mom’s cancer diagnosis. Both are doing well now, but the collision of events like these does cause me to consider that I am here, with them, at this moment. I need to make the most of it because time flies…
Like an Arrow
You are here.
–Anonymous, stairwell map, St. Joseph’s Hospital
You are here
next to a spider fern,
sweating silently in
a green vinyl armchair.
You are here
by the large window
that opens to shadowed
gray two-story concrete walls.
And through one gap—
the top of a crane,
a truck’s right front fender,
an orange plastic mesh fence.
You are here when
a June-bright sun-ray
glances precisely off
the windshield
of a white Toyota
momentarily framed
by the window’s
aluminum side jambs,
a sharpness that arrives
in one brilliant instant,
causing you to
blink back a tear.
And though you don’t remember,
you were there,
younger, invulnerable, powerful,
wiping the sweat from your damp brow
with your hayfork hand
in the wind and shimmer of mid-summer.
Yes, you were there
when, like an arrow
from an adept archer,
a photon barely nine minutes old
sliced through ninety-three
million miles of cold space
and the outer layers of skin
on your right arm.
Its dying energy
gouged a chunk
from the DNA of a
single skin cell.
At that moment
a future unchained.
It would take us
the next twenty years
to understand
what just happened.
© Steve Peterson
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