Risk of Contentment

What might happen and what might matter
Walked into a bar together. Chance,
Pollution, purity, and danger
Followed after.  "Anger produces
Optimism," what might matter said.
"People don't panic in disasters,"
Replied what might happen, placidly,
In her usual sanguinary
But hypnotically stately fashion.

"Here: 'Everything exists just by luck,'
Runs one copyrighted translation."
"Formally study uncertainty
And you will discover a certain
Exhilarating ability
To stand in the square and predict things,
A disciplined form of prophecy."
"Don't be tempted to complacency.
Confidence inters all decency."

"Events such as winning lotteries
Conform to chance, but what if chance lit
On you? What guilt would be caused by it,
What resentment if the lottery
Were that rare winning ticket to death
By cancer at an early age, won
By someone who was uncommonly
Healthily behaved, without cancer
In the genes?" "Can one love random things?"

"Who said, 'The most important questions
In life are, for the most part, only
Problems in probability'?" "You
Wouldn't want to pollute that question
By putting purity in danger,
Would you?" "I would." "But that's cruelty."
"Randomness is cruelty. That's why
There's the tendency to deny it."
The argument went on over beers,

As if no one cared who overheard,
As if the subjects of the debate
Weren't sitting in a booth, meek but near,
Near enough so that purity's ears
Were burning, danger had to pretend
Risk hadn't been raised, and pollution
Sat frozen to his bench, not breathing,
Half hoping no one would notice him.
It was the beginning of evening;

How could such an evening ever end?
Believe me, there are thirteen-hundred
Twenty-six ways of dealing a hand
Of just two cards, and what might happen
And what might matter truly were
A couple of cards, especially
After a few beers, but they were drawn
From an infinitely staggered deck,
Lumpily shuffled, with lots of blank

Choices and dark matter blended in.
So objective probability
Couldn't possibly apply to them,
Which made it all the more distressing,
Given seeming openhandedness,
That this quiet evening in the pub
Drew straight to ineluctable ends,
Jokes about clergy, mating insults,
Poets trading fisticuffs outside,

Infinity tending once again
To the same old, same old things, despite
The claims of danger to purity,
The scowls of dejected pollution,
The boasts of chance that it had to win.
Nobody and nothing ever win.
Nothing and nobody always win.
Only fearsome symmetry demands
Everything play its hand to the end.

And here's the end: a brawl erupted.
The bartender, decision, burrowed
Under the clean, hanging shot glasses,
Hunting the safety on her shotgun.
Statistics, most easily fluttered
Of disciplines, wet himself and fled.
What might happen evaporated.
What might matter wrestled purity.
Pollution kissed danger. Chance was dead.