What seemed a clarifying revision

of a pat inversion; an amalgam,

in the past, of talent and temperament, 

rather than a presently conclusive 

outcome, rather than a range of outcomes

presently visualized, projects through 

a prism, revealing, in the future, 

a spectrum of buoyant fictive outcomes,

rather than, in the past, a latent range

of possibilities – the roads that might 

have plausibly been taken, rather than, 

in the past, the germ of a singular 

outcome, only unraveled, revealing 

its own congenital deficiency.