As the Shadows, Long

god, the uni­verse, the not-me, the power, the void, noth­ing at all:

Like the arm on a skeet trap fling­ing clay,
auto­matic, relent­less fling­ing
a spin­ning disc to water,
fly­ing, the crit­i­cal first few
rev-o-lu-tions deter­mine entry angle, pro­vid­ing work
for sooth­say­ers who make sto­ries out of
the geom­e­try, ridicu­lously or not–
maybe they get lucky sometimes.

And there it is, the ran­dom trap shot clay,
run­ning flat, true or turned, inevitable,
a glance on the sur­face of time
and then up, still spin­ning as if time
itself is doing the throwing.

The apex,
the stop­page is so brief.
One moment, clar­ity, fake or real who cares,
but every­thing is slow for a moment,
I’m in it now I imag­ine, and then back down
hav­ing never really stopped at all,

And skip­ping to a stop, petered out.

The writ­ers call it the arc,
pre­ten­tious and poetic a lit­tle.
Other peo­ple, the rest of us, call it a pas­time, a life?–
all that hap­pens between two skips of a stone
and the skips too,
before we sink 

(five? ten?, one day on the Frio River I threw a stone for 13 skips) across the water.