Strange Attractor: Poems

Heraclitus   If you step into this stream now and return an hour later, everything will be different. Step into this tea- steeped water, with a few strands of grass turned September Blonde. Between the person you are to the person you will be after you step out of this stream, after you’ve wiped your eyes, after you’ve had one child, then two, then maybe three, or none at all, you’ll look up and find yourself studying the grand theories of clouds, one construed as a woman with her arms outstretched, another as a burning house. If you step into this stream, the one outside the library, not very deep, with a shopping cart rusting on its side, you’ll feel it around your ankles. Step into the stream when you’re fifteen, lose one of your running shoes (a red one), and climb up the bank, damp, shivering, and you’ll be sixty-three. Go back down to the stream to get the shoe and you’ll be thirty-seven. If you step into this stream now. If you step into this stream if you step if you return if you step. If you return an hour later you can wrap dusk around your shoulders. You might hear someone tinkering with piano keys, trying to plink a tune. Let yourself be stream, let yourself be where it comes from and where it’s going, let yourself be nothing but a smear of traffic lights, glossed ruby, glossed green, on the surface.