There is a man who is looking for something in the beach sand

Higher up on the beach there is a family

They have a giant inflatable swan

There are people in beach chairs to his right

He looks distraught

I ask, did you lose something?

Yes, a set of keys, he says

I help him

Soon some kids join the search

One little boy is asking the man good questions

Then some adults help but they do not go down on their knees

All they do is ask more questions

His answers might, theoretically, make it easier for us

The children use their rakes and shovels

Their tools seem designed for the job

He reveals how the keys were lost

His wife has Alzheimers, he explains

She is waiting with a friend in the parking lot

She was sitting in a beach chair holding his T-shirt

The keys were in his shirt pocket

When they were packing up the pocket was empty

That is his story

An hour later we are still looking

No keys

The tide is rising

His wife is still waiting

He has called his daughter in another state

She will send the spare

It will take a few days for the spare key to arrive

What will he do while he is waiting?

That is a question I never ask

He gives me his number

I say I will keep looking for a while longer

Within half an hour he is gone

Something about this whole episode makes me sad

He shook my hand to thank me for helping

Both our hands were covered with sand

Our hands were like sandpaper

Sand that the tide moves around by the ton

It sucks away more than it replaces these days

Someday someone might find a rusty set of keys

Or not

It hardly matters

I guess that's the point

But it does matter

That is also the point

On the drive home I am quiet

I am thinking of four ways we could have been more helpful

We might have increased the probability of his finding his keys

Too late

My future has been changed

Yours too
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This poem is written in the style of one line / one sentence. I find that this type of poem compresses the story in the sense that everything that is happening is right there, like stop-frames, The imagination can relax instead of wondering if it is missing something. Even though there is less flow, as the mind steps from sentence to sentence, it can be enjoyed like entering a garden where there is only one path to follow with an occasional bench to sit on. And. yet, as the title indicates, the poem is about Chaos Theory, which few of us know much about. But, keeping with the poem, we can see how, when my wife and I were settling in on the beach, I noticed that a chaotic situation was unfolding just a few yards away. I saw how the man could use some help. When I began to help him, the children got involved. I honestly thought we would find his keys and all would be well, but we didn't. The keys just weren't findable. Gradually I began to wonder if I was wasting my time. But then something in me shifted and, instead of focusing on finding the keys, I was focused on wanting the man to feel that he was not alone. In that I succeeded, with the help of the children of course. In the end, when we shook our sandpaper hands, I felt released from any self-imposed pressure to find the keys. I accepted both his fate and mine -- his, to have to wait for the spare key to arrive and mine, to metabolize the outcome of all our effort. It really felt as if the world had changed just a little because of what had happened, regardless of how it happened. How it happened was only important when it felt like, if we could piece together how and when the keys were lost, that would increase the probability of finding them. But, as we began to lose hope in finding the keys, the how and when became almost irrelevant, because time and life had somehow moved on or moved ahead. The way I see it is, even though life seems to be predictable, it is actually chaotic, but chaos is not random. Nothing is random. If we could only be truly objective we might see that creation is like a gigantic cosmic butterfly. Probably 1,0000 people are losing their keys right now or are about to, or just did, and because of that their plans must change, and that causes the wings of the cosmic butterfly to tremble -- almost imperceptibly, but tremble nonetheless.
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