Everything Is Older Than You Think It Is

Numbers, random, uncontrollable
That we have contracted to respect
And to use to determine our just
Deserts, reward me now. Sing the song
Of the unlikely, the nonmiraculous
Wonder of a broken gambler’s redemption.
At the pub, a man with an American accent,
Roughly midwestern, asked his companions
What exactly was Washington DC. A state?
No? A territory? And where exactly, relative
To Virginia? Who says what we don’t know
Will kill us? He had to be at least seventy
And robust as a lion when he stuffed
His white mane into his motorcycle helmet.
Healthy, well-fed, moneyed ignorance is bliss.
I am none of those things. I am an old poem.
My own heart is like the dove that flees
The hawk. No, my heart is the hawk
In a landscape without doves, the hawk
Who no longer cares to fly, who scans
The latest sky for the script he read there
Hundreds, thousands of years before him.