Gavin Kayner A Matter of Details

A Matter of Details

Nature attends to the details I note this as I consider the flower in my hand While my wife is on the phone in the next room With an acquaintance too often incommunicado The luminescent white and silver dollar-sized flower Has a fingernail of deepest burgundy atop each pointed petal Such an unnecessary flourish I think A bit of showing off It makes me wonder about omniscient things

Richard, I hear my wife declaim from the next room Oh my god In an accident I’m so sorry How did it happen Having lived so long I understand what that conversation means It’s the call and response of a death And a matter of details now How he died A matter of serendipity Which, of course, is too frivolous a word For the last seconds of horror and pain any misfortune Would have allowed him But it is the truth We are all subservient to the vagaries of chance

Still, how seriously we live As if it means something

The flower I’m holding is as delicate and sweet As a child’s breath Richard was vigorous—vibrant A dynamo of a person Both bloom and man share similar fates Casual casualties of an indifferent nature The how, when, where and what will have their answers But the why remains illusive Despite our theologies Despite libraries full of ruminations Despite telescopes and microscopes

I wonder how the same essence which takes such infinite care With its flowers

Puts so much of itself in harm’s way Arms predators with their teeth While gracing orchids with intricate architecture

I hear my wife murmuring consolations Even though life is unconscionable It shifts from sublimity to savagery Without shame or hesitation I see in this fantasia flower something of a miracle I heard in Richard’s quick and explosive laughter Something of joy Neither wards off inevitability Both can be crushed in an instant

This tenuous nature of being drives us to our knees Where we can worship flowers or beseech a deaf universe For mercy Seek solace from an omnipresence who considers Life and death the choice between two different hats

A whim The blossom I admire is exquisitely wrought Richard was wonderfully exuberant If neither one is the answer, there is none

My wife enters the room where I sit with my flower It’s Richard—she says—he’s been in a car accident I nod The flower chimes in my hand I slowly close my fingers around it and squeeze

Now it’s a matter of details

Gavin Kayner

Gavin Kayner's poems, prose, and plays have appeared in a variety of publications.