The System Fails

I was sitting in the backyard

before anyone woke up,

before the house started making noise,

before I had to be

anything but alone.

The grass was still wet from the night,

the sky just starting to lighten,

and I was thinking about nothing,

about the particular kind of nothing

that only comes at dawn.

Then the sprinklers.

All of them at once.

Water in an arc against the early light,

sudden and wrong,

a sound that broke

the quiet I'd been keeping.

I hadn't touched them in days.

I'd turned them off.

I was sure I'd turned them off.

But the system had its own logic,

had its own schedule,

had decided that this was the moment,

had decided without asking me,

had decided to wake up the morning

with the wrong kind of noise.

I sat there,

startled,

unable to move for a moment,

unable to understand

that something I thought I'd controlled

had simply continued on,

had simply done what it was made to do,

had simply followed

the broken rhythm

of its programming,

the rhythm I'd forgotten I'd set.