Letter from One of Many Worlds


As you knock, if it’s even you, a thousand universes,
like the moths on the screen door, wildly diverge.
In most, nobody’s home. In some, somebody
dawdles or hurries to the door, bemused or eager,
with thoughts like these, if he’s me, if he hears.

Or else you do not knock and, turning, meet me
as a bus brakes noisily and sparrows panic
and I walk out of sunset from another story,
wide-eyed with the early dark, and with the wonder
that my arms are full of groceries, and that you know me.

And of these stories, millioning their ways,
and of the sparrows, reeling, we are every one,
and in each eye the glint of all the others.
It is said these branchings, infinite, are the god.
If so, a god so swift it cannot remember.

Which is why, fond stranger, only I could tell you
of that other life in which I love you even now,
how we slept in pine-wind in a cold arboreal land,
how the faint ache down your arm and your shy, bewildered pride,
were once for a child that, now, you have never had.

But since no two of us have come by the same ways,
not even love’s first lovers would dare to whisper
What do you know, what do you really remember?
and we live, as thieves stick to their alibis,
this life of which nothing is an example.

From How Things Are, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000.