Contributor’s Marginalia: Indrani Sengupta responding to Corrie Williamson’s “Three Bobcat Day”

I have never once seen a bobcat—not in a zoo, not in my dreams. If I saw one in the wild, I’d be suitably impressed. If I saw two, I think I’d react as the “you” in Corrie Williamson’s “Three Bobcat Day” does—one minute humbled by the “absurd, impossible,” the next bartering with God for a third improbability. How easily beauty turns to bargaining. How soon and how sheepishly we invoke our Gods—even those we scarcely believe in—to our private hopes.

The truth is that two bobcats is no less divine than three bobcats, is no more divine than one (however we define, or divine, divinity). And if the logic of three, in all its holiness, was enough to assure us, then the appearance of “only three deer” near poem’s end would be as enough as a third bobcat. Which it both is and isn’t.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Psychologists say that pattern-finding is hardwired into the human brain; it’s how we picked out the bad berries from the good berries, the predator from the bush. But that doesn’t account for the Virgin Mary’s face manifesting on toast, or my (still-alive) grandma appearing to me in the velvet lush of a wingback chair. What patterns are useful, and what’s merely longing?

In an adjacent vein, Williamson asks, “Is noticing coincidence a form of divinity, or worship?” It’s a question that’s immediately recognizable—when is meaning inherent in the thing, and when is it made, and when is meaning-making enough?—and yet so arresting it takes the wind out of me each time I read it. Despite my best efforts, I want and cannot have the answer, like one wants and cannot have a third bobcat. Because the having is not the point. And when grief makes mathematicians of the best of us, desirous of numbers and patterns and answers, answers, the poem (like nature, like God) does not capitulate. Lovingly so.

So I’m learning to read the question as less a question and more, permission: to worship, to be worshipful, without the promise of divinity at the other end of that worship. And I mean “worship” loosely (but no less seriously) as the act of pausing before something worth pausing for. Like the “tea-dregs light of dawn.” Or the image the poem ends with—not bobcats, but deer. Or rather, the mind-as-deer, made “limber” by its fear of lions. It’s an astonishingly beautiful image—unquantifiable but enough.

And the last thing, which perhaps is the heart of the thing. Mired in all my reflexive pattern-finding and meaning-making, I didn’t notice the correspondence at the center of Williamson’s poem, between a “you” and an “I,” until my third or fourth read. It’s understated, wreathed through with cherry trees and steelheads returning home and other far richer things than the quiet, unassuming work of intimacy. But it serves as a reminder that communion is still possible, if not with the divine than at least something approaching it, if not an “I believe” than at least an “Oh, yes.”