A quaver like an old man’s stammer,

I descend like motes of dust for decades

into my final voice; until now, as

I stumble down the hall into the night.

Like my father the year before he died,

I grope my way through the thickening dark.

I do not believe in an inscribed fate;

yet, I am still here now, nowhere else.

A result of fractal mathematics—

one tangential thought into another?

Misdirection became the direction

reaching out like feathers testing the wind

lifting the hawk along a dry thermal

which rises above a desolated plain.

(February 26, 2024)