Lone hand grasping skyward
through a remade landscape of deep avalanche snow,
only head bobbing in a vast roiling sea -
like an indefensible wish intact years past childhood -
after the great blue boat breaks quickly apart,
after the wayward overloaded jet wears
its sudden water wings, or perhaps
the solitary figure who wanders dazed but
unhurt as twin cars smolder, wrapped around deep trees,

but somehow you are left unsmudged
after everyone else has broken; after the cancer,
after the head-on swerve to avoid who we mostly are,
that sudden, explosive internal collision,
after the epidemic, the endless pointless war,
after your bastard father fucked
you not-so-secretly for oh-so-many years.

Maybe luck, maybe happenstance,
maybe a slight trick of low-spectrum light
or weird genetics or the restorative
powers of rock-n-roll, but yours
becomes always the high quavering voice
heard through dark radio news,

blotchy face caught in sharp focus
on the bouncing hand-held
scared yet striding surely to safety,
(while the shimmering whatever
does whatever in the background)
explaining just how it is you come
to be you, the you who is here right now,
how it feels like a glide
across a bright smooth plate of fresh ice
or emerging carefully through a
thin frightening layer of bone ash,
and how perhaps we might manage
to do the same.