The Summation of Smaller Things

Choice.

Chance.

Shattered glass.

Turning left. Turning right.

A streetlight flickers, ochre, hesitant, waiting.

And in that pause, a woman drops her keys, bends,
a bus driver checks his watch, hums, exhales,
a boy with a loose shoelace stops, kneels, ties,
and somewhere, a window overlooks them all, a cat blinks.

Had she held tighter,
had the driver left an exhale sooner,
had the boy ignored the droop in his lace,
had the window been curtained
what constellations of consequence unravel?

The accident that does not happen,
the stranger never met,
the news unreported,
the orbit unbroken,
the war unfought,
the silence untouched.

Everything must sum to one.
One choice, then another, then another still,
folding into the next, multiplied, unfurling,
like Pascal’s steps through time
the weighted curve of inevitability mistaken for free will.

We do what we do because we must,
because we cannot want anything else,
because our hands, our thoughts, our breath
fall precisely where they were always meant to land.

And yet, when a poet stops to watch
a leaf, curling, sienna-edged, descending
why does he not count its rotations,
measure its rate of fall,
compute the air resistance,
but instead –

Finds himself caught

And why?

What sum could name the reticence between a falling leaf
and the ground that waits to catch it?
What theorem accounts for the way his gasp
catches – not in calculation, but in awe?

He could chart its course, plot resistance,
reduce its motion to numbers and force,
but no equation writes the way it turns,
hesitates, wavers as though deciding,
then lands – graceful, aimless, precise.

So he watches.

Not to solve, but to see.

Not to measure, but to know.

Not to predict, but to wonder.

And wonder

for all its immeasurable freight

is the only thing that will not sum.