Most of us have heard that a moment can be "pregnant with possibility," and most of us nod and move on. Francis Scudellari takes that worn-out phrase, gives it a body, and then changes its ending. In "This moment, and that next," the present is "big-belly, ready-to-drop- / everything, and / run-the-red-lights / pregnant." It is a comic, urgent picture of labour, with someone speeding through intersections because there is no time to wait. The central idea is that every passing instant is giving birth to something beautiful, and that this happens whether or not anyone is paying attention.
The second stanza makes the swap explicit. The pregnancy is "not with any oh- / so very vaguely named / possibility (you know, / or don't know, the one)." The speaker shrugs at the cliché in a chatty, slightly embarrassed aside. The line break snaps "oh-" away from "so," so the reader stumbles on exactly the vague, filler language being mocked. Against that vagueness the poem sets "a very real / if possibly uncatchable / beauty," and then a burst of colour: "cerulean lizards, lavender / jays and cobalt butterflies." These creatures are vivid, a little unreal ("impossibly" blue, the speaker says), and built to dart and flutter away, which is why they are uncatchable. The stanza closes on "we never chase," a gentle reproach. Chasing butterflies is what children do, and the adults here are busy elsewhere.
The most distinctive feature of the poem's construction is its parentheses. "(and this one / right after it)," "(or it was, / and they are, or were)," "It's (they're) giving / birth (or gave it)." The speaker keeps correcting tense and number mid-sentence, because a moment will not hold still long enough to be described. By the time you say "is," it already "was." Grammar itself falters, and the title, with its "this moment, and that next," does the same. Read aloud, the parentheses make the voice hesitate, and the enjambed lines then push it forward again. One could hear that surge and pause as something like contractions, though that is an interpretation rather than a certainty.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre; this is free verse that sounds like someone thinking out loud. The stanzas run to eight, ten and twelve lines, each two longer than the last. Whether or not that was planned, it gives the poem a quiet swelling that suits its central image. Sound plays a part too. "Big-belly," "birth," "beauty" and "bother" share a soft, rounded *b* that links the pregnancy to the loveliness it delivers and to the small effort of noticing it.
The last stanza tightens its focus. "Vaguely named" possibility gives way to loveliness "impossible / to name." The cliché was vague because it was empty, while this beauty resists naming because it is too specific and too full. The lizards, jays and butterflies shrink to a single image: "one plucked chartreuse leaf / fluttering down to the chocolate / ground." "Fluttering" borrows the butterflies' verb, so the leaf becomes a humbler stand-in for everything we don't chase. "Plucked" has no one doing the plucking, as if the world were quietly doing its own work. "Chartreuse" and "chocolate" give the scene colour and an almost edible richness. The leaf "will stay, / whether or not (looking / forward or back) we bother / to see it." The ending is plain, even deflating, and that is the point. "Bother" makes attention sound like a small chore, which suggests how little it would take.
The poem's significance lies in the tension it leaves open. Its opening urges us to run red lights, to drop everything, yet its ending says the leaf will lie there regardless. Beauty does not need our witness, but the poem implies that we need it. It makes this case through humour, self-correction and a handful of bright colours rather than a lecture, so the reader ends up doing exactly what the speaker recommends: looking closely at something small before it falls.