on a matter of probability

A Matter of Probability

Truth is only that which is taken to be true. - Tom Stoppard

I remember you most when I am home:
cracked brown leaves on my lawn,
retired blue shirt in its drawer,
accidental photos carelessly pressed
onto pages behind cheap cellophane.

but your name is pselled out here:
the street signs state it calmly
as though it were mere coincidence
that brought me here.
I pass you last name three times a week
and I wonder must i must be like
to live on your street,

remember how my teacher once said
in this room of thirty, in one of our sixty lungs
rested a molecule that Caesar exhaled when he breathed his last.
It was a statistically inescapable fact.
How then must molecules last
forever unchanged
and what it must be like
to be this kind of truth?- able to be
proven mathematically,
but no other way.

-- Sara Yenke
Rag & Bone, May 2007 vol.17 no.1