Many great ideas are accidents--

so are melodies and first lines of poems

and how about the dreams

you bump into in the middle of the night

that wake you with what you need to know.

Sometimes, heading west,

blinded by the glaring sun,

you barely miss a head-on crash and stop,

hands on the steering wheel,

learning what a gift your breath is.

And some mornings sitting here,

the movie of my life plays backwards

and looking at the screen

I’m walking backwards through doorways,

down hallways, past rooms and all my blunders

where I’m stumbling, falling, looking comical,

seeing where I’ve been

before arriving, somehow, in this chair,

these words falling from the ceiling.

And I wonder, are they accidents or gifts--

these words that come from someplace I don’t know.

And here, colliding with each moment,

I close my eyes then open them

to look around again at everything I love,

then at the sky to watch

another sunrise coming to my life.