Brad Leithauser
Long Odds
Chances are good
it's the world's oldest pair of dice, though
the adjacent card in the museum case
hedges all bets with a possibly.
But shake it off—all doubt—and heed the glow
of good fortune: these little blocks of wood
(presumably hewn from the same tree,
their pips mostly worn away),
bounced and bounded and spun
across an obstacle race
that left all the others behind.
The course was long and hazardous—designed
to lay players no less than tools of play
to rest, dust to dust, dice to dust—and they have won.
. . . although it's far from clear
what winning connotes for those
unaware of their appointed game—unaware of all
games and players. The competition here
was among little wood blocks and small
terra cotta cubes, or among (accessories
to a larger game) arrowheads, axeheads, tent
stakes, hides, whittled batons, bone fragments, bowl
shards, rags, gourds, cords
. . . Hence it's left to us
to take what's left to us
after sifting the flung sediment
of our hunched excavations and to impose
a pattern, a game for which we're the sole
spectators as well as referees.
There never was a throw that ended
interestingly. A pair of dice? Eleven sums within
a mere twenty-one configurations—
that's all. What could the result be
except a bore? Yet to the true gambler, the soul
for whom everything's always riding
upon the very next roll,
it's . . . different as the dice are tumbling. Then,
and only then (all laws of necessity suspended,
heaven's every angel dancing on the head of a spin),
a player might catch intimations
beyond mortal reckoning: the moment when
the universe, choosing its number, bares a deciding
will, partial and unforeseeable and free.
Begin with the four letters of the gene-
alphabet and throw in something like a single die . . .
That's all it takes: a raw capacity
for writing, and a certain somersaulting
summing—call it chance inspiration.
A letter; add a letter; add a letter; and if most fail
to cohere into syllables (one combination
after another that doesn't mean
anything, a babble towering skyward like a tomb),
such disappointments hardly signify.
We've simply to wait. Eventually—
Ages, eons—Mother Nature will unveil
a sonnet, one by one the bright words vaulting
out of the dice-cup womb of time.
Possibly (as our museum curator would say),
these dice had an extended run
in the marketplace, performing
their fore-cast function of getting things
moving—getting the goods into play.
What was wagered? Barley, maybe. Or wine. A bold
moon-mesmerized opal. Philters. A string of black
pearls. Mother-of-pearl. Tiny bracelet bells.
A stout songbird with clipped wings.
A magnetic rock, a straw-coated cheese. A sack
of green-gold apricots; or the pure gold
stacked in a honeycomb's six-sided cells—
plunder won in the great swarming
gambling den of the sun.
Brad Leithauser, The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.