Confidence Interval

You can summarize the articles

Share conclusions with caveats

You don't lean out beyond your skis

of 95 percent probabilities

Because truth as best we know

Lies within the confidence intervals

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But at the planning table you see

Perceived uncertainty increased

By every degree

What’s the cost of an acre lost

You hemmed and hawed and

-

They have their losses summed

To the board-foot, dollar, cent, man-minute

While you mumble mush about complexities

And unraveling threads and indices

-

And who were you, anyway to try

To speak at all for all this, all this

Honed to countless perfections by

Relentless etching since that first membrane

Snapped around acids nucleic

To form the first cell

-

And you barely old enough to drink,

Babe in a species that learned to walk

Just day before last, if you asked

-

The fir you almost backed into

Lost in your thoughts and forgetting

Your elders, your manners, your agency rules

Look before you back up, use a spotter

face the danger on the cliff’s edge

The next dent’s coming out of your check

-

Your confidence is scraping null

You're all type II error now

You’re anywhere but here

-

With the vents still blowing cold air

Hints of spruce and fir and tree marking paint

And 2 plots left but it’s already dusk

So slip the shifter, the clutch - but stop

-

Frozen before you in the road,

Poised mid-stride, unmistakeable

Cascades red fox, this you know

From guidebooks, photographs, sham

Replicas of this enigma

-

Coat a chaos of silver-tipped black

Splashes of red, swaths of tan

Legs dwarfed to spindles by

Tail, a glorious plush symphony

Great ears and ruff surrounding

-

Such a delicate face

Perhaps comical if not

For those commanding eyes that

Pin you in place, lead your

Hand to the keys to silence

rude mechanical roar, how

Dare it rattle his realm’s air

-

So much flows in those

Seconds? Minutes? transfixion

Before it flickers off into shadows

-

Tomorrow you will sit tall

At the table and draw sparks

Of that wild ferocity into assertions

Drawn from realms of truth

beyond dissertations

-

And even if they are not swayed,

leave these forests doomed to fall

They will have lost all right to deny

They knew what would be lost