|
The Miracle It's all so easily explained, how it slipped from someone's wallet (ripped nylon, or leather stretched with wear) and lay unnoticed on the asphalt while he drove off to fill the tank with gas before a stop at the grocery store, so that when I pull into his empty space in the Wal- Mart parking lot, thinking how I'm so focused on Reason, it's time to consider Faith, and trying to remember everything on my Saturday list-- Vitamin C (1000 mg tablets), sunglasses (Polarized, max UV protection), vitamins (especially for "mature adults")--I open the door and find it: a blue-and-white striped card the size of my drivers license. Credit for Heaven, it says.
At the Writers' Retreat in Scotland
| I want to believe nothing happens by accident and thus-- if the step-down transformer I used to convert the current has somehow fried my laptop's power source it must be I am intended to live like the poets of yore, work with pen & ink, my hand an instrument that channels the brooding romance of Hawthornden-- medieval turret, Lover's Loup, ghosts of Ben Jonson and Drummond, the River Esk in its leafy glen-- into marks mysterious and true as Pictish glyphs scratched in a cliff's sandstone. I might have discussed these ideas--predestination, reincarnation, how to live a poetic life--with the Hindu astrologer at my Edinburgh B&B but he was rushing out the door disk in hand, to find an Internet cafe where he could print out the ad for his evening lecture: Applying ancient science to the 21st century. Some Things Defy Explanation One morning I open my eyes and find a Siamese cat in my bedroom. No joke! and not a nightmare, either. He's a seal point, well-fed, sleek, with "Scout" on his collar tag. He must have sniffed out the secret window installed for long-gone Fritz. Even before I put in my contacts, I pick him up, walk downstairs, usher him out the door. Which might have been a mistake. One friend, a poet, tells me a cat is a poet's muse. Another, a man, laughs You blew it! You didn't spot your white knight! More likely a ghost: Fritz, or Shadow, Stokely, Simone, come back to check on me. Or my zayde, who died in Fort Lauderdale twenty-five years ago. Who knows? It might have been God. It was just one of those things that happen-- like the night in 1970, Vietnam in flames and paranoia rampant, when we came home to find the stereo on its shelf, the Nikon in full view, the cat window open, as always, and every cookbook missing. |
For additional information, please e-mail Judith Strasser