I Knew It

a poem

Four times in my life
(that I recall right now)
stealth envoys
from a mirror world
popped in
in flagrante

Once during dinner
open-air on Court Street
with two old friends
a dog, plummeting,
upside-down and straight-legged
like a capsized rocking horse
bounced off our awning
and somersaulted onto the sidewalk

He was ok

but at the table
we were changed
our locking eyes
full marbles
asking whether that
was real?
And if so
were we still pretending
time can’t bend and
planes make sense and
I can’t learn to levitate
if I set my mind to it?
After a streaker
from the next dimension
pierced the membrane
of our afternoon
dressed like a brown dog?

The next time
I’d moved far from home
when into view
popped casually
the family I’d left behind
three bodies based in Brooklyn
but now fully rendered here
as though pulled down
from the server
unzipped from the oversoul
and I was less surprised than tickled
to confirm with touch and witnesses
the case I’d sensed was true
namely that distance was illusion
and that space-time curved them toward me
and they’d always been nearby
and poised to step down
from the cloud

The third time
it was Covid
and I was hot girl walking
when I saw an older woman
hellbent
sinewed
striding briskly downhill
head wrapped in a silk scarf
(the kind you know what it means)
and then before my very eyes
she vanished from the scene
swallowed up by background fill
and of course I looked for her
down alleys
behind fences
under every parked car
and I could not find a trace
and she was my third proof point
that what we see
is just one version
of what’s really there

The last time was just yesterday
walking with my friend
on a joke of a spring day
with petals flurrying
and smelling better
than I could even fit
into my lungs
when right ahead
an object beelined
straight down through the frame
which we heard before we saw it
clatter on the pavement
so dense and loud
it might have killed us
and by instinct we looked up
at the blank and clueless sky
and then looked down
at what had dropped
and saw it was a vertebrae
but megafauna big
and hollowed out
and gnawed on
with no note or provenance

Now if that’s not a sign
I don’t know what is
and I know its meaning too
which was
everything you half-believed in
squinting and maybe
from the corner of your eye
like
Siri’s feelings
acupuncture
ghosts
and UAPs
past lives
prophets
psychics
physics
birth charts
noösphere
talking trees
infinity
and the trinity of
Contact-Arrival-Interstellar

is in fact
a yes

And I felt freed
relaxed
and mollified
because of course

I knew it