MIRACLE GIFTS THAT MAKE US WHO WE ARE

V.B. Price

CHRISTMAS 2024

For Katherine Simons and Jack Easterling who showed us who we might become.

We dream ourselves up
from what we’ve been given.
History comes upon us,
other minds happen to us, miracles

and mires, choices and errors,
all our mistakes happen, and all
the choices we chose not to make.
And then we arrive at the task

that defines us to the end,
knowing that we must
stay in charge of our own
definition of ourselves,

whatever the cost,
batting away
all assaults, well-meaning
or dread-driven.

*

THE COSMIC MATTER MIRACLE OF BEING LOVED

It’s the people who happen to us,
who give themselves to us, show us
likenesses of who we could become;
they become themselves in us
a cheering crowd of influence. But there’s
always one arch guide, innocent of power,
who gave us all we needed at the time.
Tut was mine, Tut of the gardener’s
huge hard hands and smile, a surrogate
father who survived the trenches
of WWI, survived the low-life hate
of Tuskegee and Jim Crow, and then,
in a miracle of courage
turned from his fate on an odyssey
toward home, driving impossibly west
in the 1920s to Pasadena
and found himself years later
as an older man in 1947, still
making things grow, with me
at six under his wing,
orphaned almost, bare-boned,
Spare Ribs he called me.
Tut saw to it that I’d grow up
to have a funny bone.
He schooled me in how I could
prevail, make the miracle choices
of my own that would save my life
from the accidents of my birth.

MYSTERIES LIKE SHOOTING STARS

If we’re lucky, mysteries find us
so far beyond our sense of who we are
that they set us on the path
of who we’re meant to be.
For me, it was in Chaco Canyon’s
landscape of the sun when I felt,
from the view of everything,
that nothing could ever go wrong
if we didn’t think it could. For a moment,
I was no longer just myself alone.
I was filled with such heat, such illumination
I knew if I fell from the cliff
it wouldn’t be a tragedy
to the stars, just what happened
at that moment and that it would
be up to me as I fell
not to mind if I could, in wonder
for all the life that had gone my way
so far. But then I woke to what happened,
and as I did
it vanished, leaving me
to fear the edge
all the more once again.
For one instant I had felt
I was right with it all, a child of the sun,
safe from my fears and freed
from the strangling fears of others.
*

WE ARE MORE THAN WE COULD EVER IMAGINE

If chance works our way,
more comes from us
than we ever thought was there,
appears from us like the double wings
of dragon flies
that have moved them through
the ether free
for 300 million years of probability
that no intelligence could chart.
We put our pens to paper
and sense sometimes appears.
We make connections
and ideas sometimes body forth
as forms of things unknown
that are all ours,
properties of our effort,
the struggle, the strain of revision
and patient pruning
that leads past the making to something that
simply was not there before it came from us.
We can do that, make new things
out of who we are, because
thinking is as imagination is
a property, after all, of quarks and forces
that fill the world up
with the world itself,
and we are nothing more
than a part of it.
*

CHANCE GOES YOUR WAY UNTIL IT DOESN’T

All those near misses on the freeway,
the sofa falling off the back of the truck
in front of me at 65 miles per hour
as I swerved into another lane to miss it,
no cars coming behind me.
The fool who ran the stop sign down the hill
ahead of us as we moved at 80
demolishing miles per hour, we saw it
just before our cars and us
became a gory blemish on the road.
Or the luck of a Lazarus moment
when everything aligned,
down to specks of dust,
so I could conveniently drop dead
in a doctor’s office and be brought
back to life, my brains CPR’d intact.
These bewilderments of fate
are how the cosmos operates,
an eternity of chances, infinite in possibility,
from gusts of dark matter
to the magic of workable good ideas.
And so we owe it to the stars
to always live amazed,
caught as we are between
“rapture and despair,”
with nothing to hold on to
but the brilliance and the majesty
of the next-to-nothing
that is now.

            *

THE MIRACLE GAMBLE OF THE ONE RIGHT CHOICE

Without knowing it, we make choices that become
pathways to our fate. I made mine at 17.
I chose New Mexico. Everything cascades
from that single choice in Rome in l958,
my whole way of life and everything I am,
the stream of mentors, lovers, comrades in arms, inspirations, all from that one choice,
and all the chances after that. Falling deeply
for the first best person I had ever known,
witnessing her gallant dying, then
falling deeply for the best person
I have ever known again, on the doorstep of my 80s
without comparison, a chance too slim to measure,
too startling for metaphor. Or being one half
of the cosmic force that made my children.
Or picking up a pen and seeing at the end
thousands of poems and columns fill my life,
all because I made a choice in the blink of an eye
in Rome so long ago, a choice that came to me,
as such things come to all of us,
as just a happening
that somehow comes to prove
the deluge of astonished awe
that moves throughout us all our days
is dear and true, and not a folly
of exaggeration as nothing can be more
than the wonder, fact and risk
of simply being here.

                *

We end with what we’ve made
of the gifts and mysteries
we have been given.
Our defining task,

when our usefulness
seems stripped from us,
is to defend
who we know ourselves to be,

so we can serve perhaps
in the mystery of other lives,
be perhaps for someone else
a clue, a faint path in the distance,

that leads them to believe they are
always free to be
exactly who they think
that they are meant to be.