Coincidence, is defined as an improbable synchronicity of events, on face value, unrelated but occurring with no apparent causal connection.

Like the time, several years ago, when I told my little sister to pause a few minutes, ( before departing a bar we had never before frequented and had spontaneously selected for a casual beer stop), because I had this strange feeling of certainty that in the next few moments Sue and Pete, (visiting friends of mine from Australia), were going to walk in the door and join us……and of course they did. All un-arranged, all of us spread throughout the vastness of the nation…. What were the odds of this happening at this particular time in this particular place? “How could you have known” Asked my little sister?

The long arm of coincidence strikes again.
A texture where the delicate arm of life’s fabric has rippled, unbidden, unwanted but inexorably presented in the inexplicable here and now.

What are the odds?

And again where, on a spontaneous, unplanned quick trip to Britain in 1979, I suddenly bumped into Foxie in Trafalgar Square, beneath Nelson’s column where a million people, at any given moment, teem and mingle in their frantic rush of busy, busy life. Foxie was, at that time, a neighbor from Raurimu, a remote and dwindling woodcutters hamlet, Embedded in the depths of the King Country of New Zealand. I had no idea Foxie was in Britain nor he that I was there. Ten seconds either way and either of us would have been swallowed by the rushing crowd, Arabs, black Africans, Algerians, Russians, Jews and Bengalis all teeming in their own tangent in a crossfire flood of humanity…and we, oblivious to each other’s presence….just bumped into each other….Foxie! What the f..ck are you doing here?

Again, what are the odds?

Many blame the paranormal, some put it down to extra sensory perception, the religious insist it is the hand of God, intervening. The huge majority of us put the long arm of coincidence down to happenstance, blind luck, burying our suspicions in the hurly burly of our lives, burying the disconcerting actuality amid the great unknown in that murky corner of our minds where the unexplained is deposited, unwanted, in that repository…the too hard basket.

But the chaotic nature of life throws up coincidence with alarming and disconcerting frequency, defying the principles of probability, intruding into the realm denying rational explanation. Leaving us, with the vaguely uncomfortable pretext that Albert Einstein theory that the phenomenon of unexplained coincidence should be interpreted, until proven otherwise,
......as “GOD’S CALLING CARD”!

M.
Foxglove, Taranaki NZ

He'd lived in the remaining house on the little byway,
The place and its existence somewhat accidental
As it was built as the groundskeeper's cottage
Accompanying a rambling edifice
Built by a former president of the mill,
That once-grand structure gone to rack and ruin
Nothing remaining save the odd bit of foundation
Poking forlornly above crownvetch and milkweed,
Though the lot of the man we'd dubbed the ogre
(The notion that he had an actual name
Not occurring to us at the time,
Though, as Nicky Demmer wisely noted
Whatever it might be, it must be unspoken.)
Was only slightly less unkempt and foreboding,
And it is hard to remember what exactly made him
Something to be feared and avoided at all costs,
Perhaps the combination of height
(Though lessened yet somehow accentuated
By a slight yet perceptible stoop)
And a widow's peak at the top of an unusually high forehead
Bookended by wiry and unruly locks,
Perhaps the fact that he rarely appeared in the daylight,
And then squinting as he turned his head to the sky
In the manner of one who fully expected
That it would fall, Chicken-Little style
But in any case his lawn
Was strictly no-man's land,
And any wiffle ball or frisbee,
Regardless of how new it may be
Or the retribution attached to coming home without it,
Remained behind, mourned but forsaken
And at some point we moved beyond our unease,
Too old for such superstition,
Moving on to other totems, other portents
Though some years later I happened upon his obituary,
Laying out the signposts of an ordinary
Though vaguely underwhelming and melancholy life:
He'd worked on the third shift at the mill all his days,
Thus precluding much of the social commerce
With his fellow man, no Rotary or Odd Fellows rites
To be performed at his service
(Of which there was none, burial being private as well)
And the list of survivors was limited to one daughter
Wholly unknown to us, ostensibly taken elsewhere
By an unmentioned and unmourning mother.
The item, brief and unadorned as it was,
Brought me back to that fretful nine-year-old self,
Though imbued with a greater disquiet,
As I had a deeper knowledge of the finality
Of cold, agate type, among several other things.

The truck was crushed and dented
Almost beyond recognition
When the county boys reached the scene
(Though, as one of the deputies remarked,
Having seen the vehicle tottering around town
For virtually all his born days
Still ain’t much worse than when it started)
Apparently having slid off the Stamford Road
Then down the embankment
Where it had made an unhappy embrace
Of a utility pole near the old Ulster and Delaware tracks,
A rather unhappy ending to what had been
An arguably equally unhappy existence,
Though old Doc Benner had surmised
The junkman had probably been dead
Before the truck had made the shoulder,
Or so he had said at the graveside service
(He being one of the three or four in attendance
Feeling that one who’d been a common thread
In the existence of so many for so long
Should not go without some commemoration
In this already frayed-at-the-edged little town)
And he remarked that the old man had once told him,
When the doc noted the old saw
That one man’s trash was another’s treasure,
The main diff’rnce ‘tween trash and treasure
Is just a matter of expectation,
And it would have been most poetic if,
After the reverend’s perfunctory hand-off to the Almighty,
The clouds had broken and a thin shaft of light
Had fallen upon the junkman’s stone,
Or perhaps a gentle rain commenced
To heal the disturbed sod,
But the skies remained a slate-gray truculence
As the sexton’s ancient pickup tottered away,
The ropes and shovels tossed higgledy-piggledy
Under an ancient and somewhat watertight old tarpaulin.

Plundered in the gentle light
Yet felt that this was, oh so right,
Succumbing to the wafting way
Of oriental, ****** play.

M.
Cambodia 1966