How Equivocal Is the Drift of Things
by Oliver Rice

Here we are in the present.
This is the patriarch, this the matriarch.
These are their sons and daughters
and those their further offspring,
cousins through the fourth generation of tots,
a clan capriciously dispersed about the city
and as distant as Detroit and San Antonio,
its integrity eroded by affinities for inlaw clans
and by disturbances in the double helix.

Here we are in their rooms,
witness to their privacies, their situations,
the distribution of their temperaments and talents,
the past arriving
according to various tellings of their stories.
How idiomatic are their opinions,
how ambiguous their aspirations,
the shadows in their voices,
the small rules of their evenings.

Out there is the zeitgeist at work.;
How restless are the probabilities,
are the rumors that come in on the wind,
the memories of the streets,
littered with myth and causality,
with politics and dailiness.
How equivocal is the drift of things,
how enigmatic the collective soliloquy.

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