Boy with a Coincidence

Posted on June 19th, 2009 by george.
Categories: poetry, life, friends, music, epiphany, serendipity, coincidence, numbers.

This morning my hands were so full that I left In Rainbows on the kitchen counter by accident.  I had to choose a CD on the commute, so I picked one from my case that’s been neglected for weeks:  The Shepherd’s Dog, by Iron & Wine.  At work I got a tweet from Sholeh.  She hadn’t tweeted in over a month. It read, “One year since I came back from Haifa: http://sholeh.calmstorm.net.”  I hadn’t been to her blog in months.  I read her prose and poetry and realized I hadn’t written in just as long.  I was inspired, so I wrote this:

deep in diodes
the world at a stop
my lifeblood pulsed
the same shade
as the light
cast off by electrons
funneling down the rabbit hole
at the moment
providence beamed upon my crown
a glimpse
of the essence of red

now drinking daily
from the only watering hole
the ripples calm
to reveal a change in stripe

is this some new animal
some tender new shoot
or the same heart
sheathed in endless years?

what use is fluttering
madly
in a cage designed
not to confine
but instruct?

wings newly wed

will spread
soon enough

for now they flutter
bear
and endure

for ultimate reunion awaits

more powerful than any
in this life

At the exact moment I finished writing, I got a text from Lorenia reading, “New blog post!”  I clicked through the link to fresita.org on Sholeh’s blog, read all about psycho kitty (qu’est-ce que c’est?), and promptly posted a comment.  The second it posted, I saw that Sholeh had commented at the exact same time, down to the minute.

Ok.  So great coincidence, right?  Just wait, the braid draws tighter.  I was lost in thought on the drive home, Sam Beam

cooing my worries to sleep, when I realized I had just heard The Lovesong of the Buzzard, the song whose meter inspired my last good poem, Alhambra, written about Lorenia.  Down the road, I glanced up at the glowing, green traffic light passing overhead, right at the moment Sam sang, “Like stubborn boys with big green eyes.”  In fact, I saw it precisely as he said, “green.”  It struck me that in the poem I’d just written, I referred to sitting at a red light, staring at the LEDs.  Now the light was green, a symbol of hope, and I was moving forward.  The song ended, and the very next track was “Boy With a Coin,” which Sholeh had first clued me in to on 07-11-07, while she was in Haifa, the place she wrote about today.  Coincidentally, we had one opportunity to launch of STS-127 this week, but a faulty GUCP valve scrubbed it until 07-11-09, exactly two years later.  Furthermore, on the poem Alhambra, Sholeh’s comment was, “makes me think of sunsets, for some reason. lovely.”  The poem she wrote that inspired me today?  It’s entitled, “sunsets always make me miss everyone.”

In searching for where she mentioned that song, I entered “coin” on sliding thoughts and came up with exactly two entries…both about coincidences.  In searching on LJ for the same, I found a fitting end to this post.

into my heart’s treasury
i slipped a coin
that time cannot take
nor a thief purloin, –

oh better than the minting
of a gold-crowned king
is the safe-kept memory
of a lovely thing.

-Sarah Teasdale

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