A Poem

"It Cannot Be Said for Certain" by Kay Ryan, from the new issue of The American Scholar:

It cannot be
said for certain
that imagining
a pattern is
self-flattery.
Our acts could
matter. At some
unfathomed distance
the random
could condense
to something -- say
a fork -- against
the velvet dark.
The silver shiver
that we get from
time to time
somewhere adding
up to silver. The
vacancies we suffer
the necessary black
between the tines.