as I pulled out of the skateland parking lot

as I pulled out of the skateland parking lot at 8:30 at night

and down onto the dark wet trough of south bay road,

after attending shawn’s 11 year olyversary party with my daughter and others,

maggie asked from the backseat, “can I have your phone to choose a song?”

she put on alex winston’s “locomotive” and the car filled with that

familiar, addictive guitar and hi-hat intro that suddenly seemed

more evocative of racing around a roller rink

than an old-fashioned train engine’s rhythm.

yesterday at work, when recording places I’d left newsletters

and updating address changes in my spreadsheet,

I was stunned to discover that the 5th avenue sandwich shop

had moved this year from its long-time location at 117 5th avenue SE

to 116 legion way SE, not just a consecutive number away

but also, in fact, by coincidence to the exact middle of the block again,

only one street south from where it had been,

so that, in a sense, its regular patrons will now look out windows

with their backs turned to the backs of their earlier lunching astral imprints,

as connected by the adjacent buildings’ guts and whatever ley lines

link us to the secret meaning the world strings throughout our lives

in such a precise pattern that it begins to resemble a spider’s web.

if I could build a brand new search engine, it would have but one purpose

and that would be to hone in on half-remembered topics

my girlfriend and I have talked about in our ever-proliferating correspondence,

which has ranged from texts to long emails with numerous links

to snail mail letters with assorted gifts to so many haikus

that we could soon fill a whole series of chapbooks with them

to, of course, all the phone calls and in-person conversations

and then too the communication I receive from her

when I meet the searching gaze of her hazel eyes.

somewhere, back in the beginning, this woman

with whom I have so much in common ― from our niche professional duties

to not just favorite directors and writers and musicians

but also even specific songs and so on

to the fact that we happened to sit beside each other

at the public reading for the poetry anthology we were both included in

to the fact that she lived two blocks from me

for years while we were each married to others

without our getting to know each other, to so much more ―

she wrote that coincidence is a pet interest of hers,

and isn’t that just the center of the web

from which all the sticky spokes radiate,

vibrating as we encounter them like an old familiar song

kicking in in a new context that clarifies its meaning

in a way that makes more sense than even the creator could have intended.