Coincidences
There are no coincidences. Everyone knows this. All that occurs in this rain-washed, sky-shrouded world Is aligned to the beat of a greater heart: This expansive stretch of time, Reaching out like the alphabet From the Anthropocene to the Zeitgeist Is ordered and labelled for a reason And there are no coincidences. Everyone knows this. There are frequencies on strings we cannot hear That buzz and thrum to a separate rhythm If we cannot understand, why try even to listen? It gets harder to stretch outwards and explore As each day tightens, knot like, around our ankles And shackles us to what went before, until we learn That there are no coincidences. Everyone knows this. But the consensus doesn’t have to be true: If it is written in the stars, we have to learn To read between the constellations. The sublime isn’t found in the regular repetition Of rhythmic rotas, and the lines that border our days Can neatly be hurdled: and if, just if This claustrophobic alpha asphyxiation of hours Can be escaped into a beta of beyond Where we ignore what is written for us, and Dance a drawing instead: then, only then, will we find That we can make our own coincidences. And we will know this. Elsewhere
this frail, / Travelling coincidence —Larkin Which out of nowhere makes me think about my mother playing marbles in the streets of Singapore. Orchids, like an eye mid-blink, strung up in glass like pink and blue sweets clattering from her bag into the drain and down the road. With tears in her eyes she wandered home in the absolute rain. When the time came she made her goodbyes and went back to England. Or Hong Kong, or Berlin – wherever she ended up I was there, if no more than a pattern in a marble flung down a street I might never see. Look—here you can see all the way from my home to where I drank tea with you in Morocco. |
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