Almost

I peer inside it to make sure, and yes,
this is your car beside mine in the lot,
your jacket on the seat, your children's mess
of blankets and stuffed animals: I spot
a letter to be mailed, a shopping list.
Not spotting you, at last I drive away,
framing my joke; how cleverly you missed
lugging your mother's bags on shopping day!
And think how easily — by blindest chance —
this cell or that could have flicked elsewhere, failed
to clasp in that first moment of the dance
that life begins with, how you could have sailed
out of all possibility, downstream,
lost to my flesh forever, like a dream.
 

© Rhina P. Espaillat

From Where Horizons Go (Truman State University Press, 1998),
winner of the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.