Wedding Season

“There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

• Albert Einstein

One thing you notice about the wedding
At Cana
Is that Mary knows what’s up.
It’s sometimes subtitled Jesus’ first public miracle.
Suggesting a currency of private miracles along the way.
I wonder if Jesus, in a fit of humanity, ever tripped his brothers
Hands in his cloak, sitting criss-cross apple-sauce
When they were being insufferable asses?
How much instruction in miracles did the Madonna
Provide
In order to recite her one and only line of the Gospels:
“Do whatever it is He tells you … “

Yesterday the man who lives in the blue Plymouth with a plastic sheet for a windshield
behind Market St.
Startled me walking with Aidan late into the night
Startled not by the man, I had seen him before, but by the humility of his home.
This man, black as smoked iron, played Bach on Biltmore Ave.
So beautifully,
and the light was so perfect,
and I had a dollar in my pocket.

Humans love a binary,
“Either everything:
The Bach,
The gap-toothed man,
did his second-hand plastic survive last night’s storm?
The sunlight breaking out,
A dollar.
Is a miracle,
said one
Who escaped my Nazi grandfathers’ ovens,

A man,
his father’s, father’s violin, soon for Finkelstein’s Pawn.
A dollar,
absently dropped into my beer-soaked jar, by a dusky blonde
at a wedding in Canton,
the night before,
Or nothing is,”