What
is the difference
my son asks (water rivering
across the table) between
mistake (water pooling
on the mottled landscape
of our tiles) and
accident? I am
squatting on the floor, cloth
in hand, while he
traces—with the same
hand that moments ago hung
mid-air
like the fleshed signal
of fault (I didn’t mean to do it, I
didn’t see it
there)—hidden figures
in the smooth stone: pterodactyl,
pterosaur, pteranodon—
some version of which
in rock or sediment once was found.
Death by impact.
Death by gas.
The difference I say, looking out
over the sink
into intervening trees
and rain, is knowledge and intent
versus (is this
even right?) something
that happens by chance.
The rain falls
in large, silver coins
that globe the earth. You might
read
in every shattered
drop that scripts the lawn the price
(And what
does intent mean?)
of freedom or the suddenly illumined
secret
a finger blindly points to
in an opened book—prophecy
a kind of knowledge you
happen upon
by luck other hands designed. Plot,
said Aristotle,
who knew a thing or two
about the aleatory, is the arrangement
of the incidents—
the datum of a life given
in action, the account of which we call
story. It means
doing something
on purpose like lolling on the floor
instead of
helping me clean. When
my mother tells stories she feeds them
in one mouthful—
pruned of ornament
and bereft of counterfactual. The distance
from incident
to consequence
one swallow, whether ending in tears
or joy. Where
does something begin
and where does it end? Now there’s
a mystery
no story unspools.
Just ask the common house sparrow
—our domestic theropod
channeling the air
as it leaves our empty feeder—
living proof
that even death
is action without end.
Supritha Rajan is an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her poetry has been awarded Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize (2007) and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have been published in Conjunctions (online), New England Review, Washington Square Review, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, and elsewhere.
