[encore] 1103: Chaos Theory by Clint Smith
[encore] 1103: Chaos Theory by Clint Smith
This episode was originally released on April 24, 2024.
Transcript
I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.
I stood before an applauding audience, after just finishing a reading in Mystic, Connecticut. I thought, “How is this my life?” — one in which a quest for language is a welcomed source of communal joy and discovery. Even here, on this podcast, I get to share with you poems written by poets that, hopefully, you experience as moving, and even as a necessary part of your day. What a life!
Over the years, because of this art, I have made friends and students who are like family, and readers who challenge me to do more than dilly dally, who seek a spiritual purpose to words and how we use them.
Recently, I sat with my son Langston on my roof, as a sunset on the horizon bewitched the hills off in the distance. I had a similar feeling. I fell in love with writing and reading poetry, just as he entered the world. He and I have journeyed together, and alone. It wasn’t easy for us at times. I am lucky and proud of him and me. We’ve overcome personal challenges that have, in its wake, placed us in greater tune with each other.
Looking on my past, I think to myself what if — what if I had made different decisions? What if I had applied for an MBA instead of an MFA? What if I never fell in love with the world? Or said yes to that dream job that turned out to not be a dream job? Occasionally, I try to follow the series of decisions that led me to this present, however triumphant or painful. My life wavers between fate and destiny. But then again, poetry brings me to the belief that some mysterious force is at work, below, that unveils a spiritually deeper meaning to it all.
Today’s poem follows a similar trajectory of what-ifs, imagining possibilities far different than the present reality.
Chaos Theory
by Clint Smith
If twenty million years ago the butterfly flew in a different direction do you think we would have met, maybe we wouldn’t have even been people, maybe we wouldn’t have even been us, you know, maybe you would have been a tortoise and I would be a raspberry, maybe we would both be plants on opposite sides of the same coral reef, so that we could have been connected without ever having met, maybe I would be an oak cut down to be the home that held you, maybe I would have never been, maybe the butterfly’s wings would have blown the seed into the river and away from the soil which otherwise would have become a bush of blueberries which otherwise would have been eaten by a squirrel or some other prehistoric rodent which otherwise would have died in a field of milkweeds which otherwise would have been carried by the wind to another place which otherwise might have gotten caught in the feathers of the bird which otherwise might have flown to the other side of the sea I could go on but what I mean to say is that it would have been such a tragedy if something happened that would have prevented me from meeting you like a butterfly who didn’t realize it was flying in the wrong direction.
"Chaos Theory" by Clint Smith from COUNTING DESCENT © 2016 Clint Smith. Used by permission of Write Bloody Publishing.