By Chance Poem by Daniel Ionita

My aunt Rodica's tomcat
never caught a single mouse
because
those mice were much more clever
than his excellency the tomcat Tutuluţ.
Understandably, the tomcat,
otherwise well fed by aunt Rodica
prefers those small morsels of cat food,
which appear, as if by magical chance,
day after day, in his little saucer
by the house door -
instead of some mice who are, by chance,
neurotic, whimsical, downright recalcitrant,
and with no fixed address.
By chance,
my piano teacher,
Miss Iliescu,
was still a virgin at seventy-nine years of age,
and was claiming virginity
as others claim some basic human right.
She used to teach the piano
to the children of a Mavrocordat lady,
from an obscure branch
of this famous family.
Somewhere in the midst of all that, by chance,
I even reached adolescence,
but all that happened after I had been born,
also by sheer chance,
a few years before,
a consequence of a chance encounter,
involving both of my parents in culpable fashion.
Or at least this is what the gossip says -
if you are to believe all that
people blather about.