Chirality (Rae Armantrout)

I had to look up the meaning of the title of today's poem by Rae Armantrout (neat last name). It's a chemistry term meaning 'handedness' - like the symmetry observed between your right and left hand. A pairedness.

This poem, with its small stanzas, asks unanswerable questions. Perhaps, the chirality is between the question and its answer. You can ask an open ended question, but the answer may have nothing to do with the question.

Similar as to how your reflected right hand is not your right hand - the mirror, instead, shows a different image - your left hand -- a question with chirality is one that leads on and on to new topics and answers and doesn't really seem related to the original question at all. Perhaps, poetry is often like this too. When writing a poem, you often end up in a place you didn't expect at all.

Favorite line: "If I didn't need / to do anything, / would I?"