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Woodland Pattern™    Book   Center Poetry Archive		Michael O'Leary Michael O'Leary is the co-editor of Flood Editions and he works as a structural engineer in Chicago.

Politics Michael O'Leary

I watched the polls as breathlessly as Deadwood, dedicating hours at work to downticks in the South and found an article online on survey weight and sample size which led to Leibniz's response to a Bernoulli on whether the likelihood of early death can be inferred from death tolls past: Nature's habit is patterned on the repetition of events, but only for the most part. Like anybody, I was moved by the long odds of the campaign, the painful progress, how his dad abandoned him for his career and especially when Rev. Wright spoke at the National Press Club. A week before election day I saw a picture of a sad Obama walking down the street in Honolulu—slight haze of pollution in the humid air, palm trees unmoving, cars unmoved, the dark apartment tower where his grandmother lay dying now— now at the pivot of relief and grief that there is nowhere left to go and no one to turn to, the habit of reflection split in two by revelation that entropy is another name for what is otherwise unsaid.

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