Mike Stone's «Possibly Inevitable» opens with a boast that sounds a little like weariness: "There is not a single square I haven't stood on, / Not a single piece I haven't touched." The double negatives pile up a sense of completeness, as if nothing is left to visit. The speaker has the flat confidence of someone who has seen it all, and the poem soon reveals why: the board is a chessboard, and the players can wind time back and try again.
The middle of the poem is its machinery. "A move is made / A consequence obtained" has no punctuation and reads like a lab report. Both verbs are passive, so no one is named as acting, and cause and effect seem to run on their own. "Obtained" is a telling word, because it treats consequences as things you collect rather than things anyone suffers. Then the vocabulary turns to computers: "we backup and replay it differently." Anyone who has reloaded a saved game after a bad decision will recognise the impulse. The do-over wipes out the stakes, and the only limit on it is appetite, not wisdom or mercy: "Or until we're sated." That last word makes the gods sound like diners working through a menu of outcomes.
Then comes the hinge: "We're all gods around a chessboard." It is the plainest line in the poem, and "around" matters. The gods are not above or beyond the board but seated at it, like friends at a café table. "All" makes godhood common, almost ordinary. There is also a puzzle here. In the opening the speaker has stood on the squares and touched the pieces, which is what something inside the game would do. Now the speaker sits outside it. The poem seems to want us to be mover and moved at once. That is an inference, not something the text says outright, but the shift in position is hard to miss.
The final stanza changes voice. "They say" hands the argument over to hearsay, and the confident "I" disappears. What "they say" is the old idea that given endless time, anything possible must eventually happen. Stone makes possibility sound like a person: even a small one, "lonely and remote," will be found in the end, "somewhere in eternity." "Somewhere" is a word of place used for time, so eternity becomes a vast territory where every stray possibility finally gets its visit. The syntax is loose and spoken, as if someone is repeating a thing they half-believe, and the long adverb "inevitably" slows the line before it lands, echoing the title.
That echo changes how the title reads. "Possibly" and "inevitable" look like opposites, yet the poem argues they are neighbours: leave enough time, and the first becomes the second. This quietly undermines the gods' power. If they replay "for different consequences" until every branch has been walked, their freedom is only the means by which everything possible comes to pass. They are not choosing what happens so much as working through what must. And "consequences" still implies that someone bears them, even in the branches that get rewound.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its sentences stop firmly only a few times, at "touched," "sated" and "chessboard." Between those stops, unpunctuated lines drift along with the mechanical ease of a game that can always be restarted. The opening lines are short and declarative, while the last stanza stretches into longer lines with a gentle lilt ("No matter how lonely and remote"). The mood moves from a player's swagger to something closer to vertigo.
The poem is worth reading because it fits a large, unsettling idea into a few lines and makes it domestic through the simple image of a chessboard. It leaves the reader with questions it never answers. If every possible game is eventually played, including the cruel ones, what does it mean to be a god? And what does it mean to be a piece?