briefest downward
swish
of our eyelids—
when the unconscious
works hardest
to perfect its
most plausible
and yet least grim
denial of that
absolute black;
and it's there, too,
in the invisible
kiss against our lips
we feel as each stubbornly
fixed prior cause
is wed
to its capricious next
proximate effect,
both smug
in their insidiously
universal perpetuity—
it's the one simple thing
which even
the Buddha
could never quite manage
to cross off
his to-do list
and the very last bit
of Newton's
old physics
which still resists
all modern attempts
at interpretation;
it's god's
damn machine;
the irreducible
constant;
the little trouble we
laypeople call:
expectation.
