“Serendipity in the Cosmos”

by Jim Tilley

I could try to deal with the big question
of why any of us is present in this universe,
but that would cause me to set aside
the immediate matter of why I was absent

from my bedroom yesterday afternoon,
not reclining against my pillows as I usually am,
reading poetry before I finally succumb
to the warmth of the late-day sun.

It would also force me to shelve the questions
of why my son took up golf at age four,
why we bought this Tudor house
fourteen years ago, with a lawn barely

large enough for a full wedge shot, yet far too
vast to maintain ourselves, and how we found
our immigrant gardener of ten years,
whose men forever struggle against the tug

of their mowing machines with spinning blades
that occasionally catch a stray stone
embedded in the rough and sling it as if towards
some unknown enemy who does not realize

his fortune is about to change. It is no small thing
that the workers came this week on Monday
when Tuesday is their usual day,
and in the afternoon instead of morning,

and I have to wonder why, after all the years
his mother told him not to play in the backyard,
my son grabbed a fistful of old Titleist balls
last fall before he returned to college,

still not listening at age twenty-one,
and knocked them back and forth across the lot,
then left them strewn upon the lawn
for a workman to snag as he tilted and turned

the lumbering hulk of his mower. It remains
a mystery how the dimpled projectile managed
to arc its way into the third-story bedroom,
leaving a telltale hole in the pane

of a window normally swung wide open
to let in fresh air, but cranked shut after the April
heat wave broke. Of course, you say,
it is now clear why there was little resistance,

the inside winter storm having been removed,
the summer screen raised, the indoor
shutters not drawn because the sun was not yet
low enough to be blinding, but no one,

not even the muses, can explain why
my ex-wife decided yesterday that it was time
at last to cast off her heavy blanket of loneliness
and have me take some smiling photographs

to post to her friends, thus causing me
to edit her favorite few on the laptop computer
in my office far away from the spray of leaded glass
that showered the spot still cooling

on my pillow where I had left the May issue
of Poetry opened up to Jane Hirshfield’s
Assay Only Glimpsable for an Instant, one moment
black and white and then a rainbow of color.