But for a pope’s decree
and eleven lost days
all lifetimes ago,
today would be just
one more fall day.
Not marked out
with its brand of slashes
and ohs, not reserved
for wedding calligraphy,
stamped on cocktail napkins.
It’s the symmetry that always gets us.
Something nature does
sometimes
and well, but not often.
My lopsided breasts testify,
so too my right eye, its
iris richly stained, the color
walnut or chocolate or old blood.
This butterfly has a nick in one wing;
this leaf’s toothed edge is gapped.
The perfection of mirrored pairs and
matched lines we glimpse only
but want more.
So this 1 and 0 evenly portioned out
spells auspicious
makes us look for omens
where otherwise we might just find
a day, unembellished.
I’ll tell you:
what makes a day
this day
special, it’s not on the calendar.
It’s not in the numbers.
I heard a little of it in the rhythm
of falling acorns, drumming on
the cooling ground’s
sun-warmed scalp.
It’s in the kamikaze acrobatics
of a bark-colored squirrel,
zooming around the bowl of my backyard.
Gravity makes him delight in his
attempts at flight,
or maybe something in the air or
the way my dog appreciates his efforts.
It’s in the near-quiet of an afternoon,
the crickets taking a breath
before the night’s movement.
A breeze moved only the
highest leaves, as they reached over the others
for a few last gulps of light.
Then there’s this:
tonight the yellow sliver of the moon
has caught her horns in an oak tree,
and she may not be able to free them.
She may spend the entire night there,
tethered, looking in my front window,
while the sky tracks around her.
We try to augur on paper,
adding numbers, scrying days and weeks
for meaning,
missing what’s really there.
What’s more important to you?
The weight of three tens
or
a sky flushing sunset, filling
the whole world with candy pink
and quiet,
making you look
until it’s gone.
