Mari L’Esperance – Ⅰ

Happiness and happenstance share the same root 

 

 

 

Trees know the meaning of happenstance.

So does the sea and all that lives in her.

As a girl swimming in a pond buzzing

with horseflies, I felt a cool current

slide over me, then pass on. This

was the lesson, though I did not know it then.

The harbor is not our permanent home.

Think of love and its stages: rapture,

the wound, then the final parting.

Knowing from the start how it will end.

We breathe into our cupped hands, hoping

to keep it alive as long as we can.

Among shouts of laughter the carousel

slows its tune, then falls still, and a child

returns from that world to this.