Life is a record album I sometimes listen to backward
searching for secret messages,
though the ones I hear playing it forward the usual way
are no less mysterious.
Just now, for example, I notice a spider
has claimed a corner of the ceiling
where three straight lines converge
as in a painting by Mondrian,
only at the center of this composition is murder
if you happen to be a fly or a moth.
Does death really have to be in the middle of a thing
before we can call it beautiful?
Earlier today I was listening to Simon and Garfunkel
singing, “Save the Life of My Child,”
a song I’ve known all my life, about a boy leaping
to his doom from a New York building,
and for the first time I heard the words
“Hello darkness my old friend”
inserted from an older song, slowed down
and buried in the mix so as to be almost unrecognizable.
Yet there it was, a secret message hiding in plain sight,
waiting all these years for me to finally pay attention.

Photo by Anton H from Pexels