Finding yourself in some distant world
someday, in a place you’ve never been,
where the skyline and people seem alien,
despite being so archetypically familiar,
you cannot help but notice
the perfectly spaced trees and benches,
along a rounded, gravel path,
the black lab lunging at the ducks,
being fed by perfectly cute children,
who are somehow frozen in their moment of elation.
There you are, in a world so new,
the light hitting everything just so.
For a moment you think this must be
one of your imagined adventures,
a dream seeming too real.
After all, koala bears can’t say, I love you,
and you never face your fears so calmly,
and you never create new universes
just by speaking the words that come tumbling
from the recesses of somewhere more than matter.
That is but legend, metaphor, myth.
But then you look up at that face,
more familiar than ever in this new space,
and at the moment of this big bang,
you wonder with your fiercest hope
whether some of the resulting planets
will someday be able to support life.

If we closed our eyes
and clasped our hands,
tightly but tenderly,
just so,

I imagine we would be whisked away
in a whirl of color and light and flying or falling.
Time would rush madly to a standstill,
and we would come to know the mysteries
that puzzle philosophers and propel poets.

Of course, rain would still be rain,
and inevitable evenings stuck in traffic
would continue like clockwork,
each minute dragging its feet.

But every so often, there would be
a sweet reminder of all we had seen,
the windshield blurring, just so, with rain
and the light from the streetlamps
reaching through the dark toward us
and pulling us along on our way home.