Everything Matters

A dash of ocean in its corner

framed by a faraway cloud

a poem is like a picture of the sky.

It tries to explain everything,

to be the last line in the holy book,

a unified field theory of the world.

It does not tell us the story

of how the ants crawled along the street-lit wire

each stopping to smell the face of the passing other,

briefly, trickling off like a drop of water.

Nor does it tell us about the rising

smoke, which billows through the gate

like a thought bubble, then whisked away

like a prayer.

These are too minute, like what I would write

on the back of the picture itself,

before slipping it in the mail.

When you found it in your mailbox

I’d be gone, long gone

and when you read the letter’s lines

you’d gasp as the sky opened up

the truth obvious at once