The Choice Surface

Two futures opened before me there,
Not roads through woods, but fields of air,
A landscape shaped by hands long gone,
Their choices hardened into dawn.

I could not walk where none had been,
For every path was framed within
The boundaries inherited from those
Whose purposes had shaped the flows.

I stood not choosing fate entire,
Nor writing all that I desired.
I chose among the forms at hand,
A single step across the land.

And when the choice was finally made,
One branch endured, the others stayed
Not lost, but lingering in thought,
The futures possible, but not.

The mark was small. I could not know
How far its consequences flow,
What distant actors yet unborn
Might find transformed by where I'd gone.

For purpose is not measured then
By certainty possessed by men,
Nor by the feeling of the choice,
Nor by the strength of any voice.

Its magnitude is known instead
In paths that future walkers tread,
When choice becomes constraint, and space
Takes on a newly altered shape.

The fields evolved as fields will do,
With countless forces passing through,
And most of history simply grows
Along the gradient it knows.

Yet sometimes one decision stands
And subtly rearranges lands,
So future travelers find their way
Across a landscape changed that day.

And ages hence, if any see
The provenance that followed me,
They may discern what I could not:
How one choice reshaped what could be thought.

<a nod to Robert Frost>