This week’s poem, Mark Melnicove’s “Postulates,” engages with the probabilities, precarities and ephemerality of the universe – and of our lives. I love this poem’s oracular voice, its wide-ranging list-making, and how it illuminates a world at once terrifying and exhilarating.

Melnicove, recipient of PEN’s New England Discovery Award and a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, has written two ekphrastic poetry collections – “Sometimes Times” (Two Palms Press, 2017), with printmaker Terry Winters, and “Ghosts” (Cedar Grove House, 2019), with painter Abby Shahn. Recently retired from Falmouth High School, where he taught English and creative writing, he now teaches as a writer-in-residence in Maine schools.

Postulates
By Mark Melnicove

Without a concordant deity
symmetries fracture.

Not all planets
move in predictable orbits,

even ours. You and I
are only probabilities,

transient ones
at that. Just because

stairs go down, it doesn’t mean
there’s a way up.

The unexplained remains,
predominating. Some DNA

damage is irreparable.
No frame

can forever keep
your symbols from migrating

to meaninglessness.
Ringlets of hair, unanchored

from skulls, won’t curve
for ruminations. Random fluctuations

are raging. No flower absolutely
resembles another. Nothing,

except for nothingness,
ever happens twice.

I have lots of sentences inside me
I’ll never utter.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Postulates,’” copyright 2023 by Martin Steingesser, is reprinted from Sometimes Times, by permission of the author.

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