Long ago was the then beginning to seem like now.
—John Ashbery, “Blue Sonata”
I take the kids to dinner, and Finn
eats all his grilled cheese and fries, and Vivian eats
half her plain cheese pizza. We read Winnie the Pooh
and color with old crayons in a torn and well-used
Garfield coloring book. Curious to think that years ago
I would never have known to imagine
that this would be my destiny.
Neither of my children
spills a drink nor throws
a fit nor starts to randomly scream
like lovesick pterodactyls,
and the evening feels
like a divine success. It all comes to this.
Mom, says Vivian, what is destiny?
She is quoting Star Wars.
Perhaps this is what gets me thinking
along these lines, of the difference
between destiny and fate
and how it is I find myself here
at The Angler Inn on a Wednesday night
after running odd errands and finding it
late to get home to make dinner.
I do not say to Vivian, Destiny
is a predetermined course of events
often held to be an irresistible power
or agency. I say, It’s what will
happen to us someday.
She is thinking of Anakin, not
of her own someday, nor the someday
of her mother. In the parking lot,
my son stares long at the waxing moon
all skirted in clouds and warmish shine,
and the boy says, Mom, I wish
it could be like this every night.
It is just as Ashbery said.
“Each image fits into place, with the calm
of not having too many, of having just enough.”
I don’t want to make more of the night than it is.
The egg yolk on my salad not too hard, not too soft.
The barking dog we do not hear. The clear scent
of my daughter’s hair, her weight shifting in my arms.