15. Untitled except for These Words I Give it at the Start

too lovely for words | I might say

the way darkness presents itself

as a covering-over | when it presents

the lights rimming the harbor

blinking signals in the air | a string

of lights on the | drooping lines of

the Verazzano | darkness reveals

we are now too old | to see our

children often | a generation

separates us from them | we see

different worlds | maybe we look

back | or we have detached ourselves

from the future | we are preparing

the world is burning | jungle by jungle

a virus coming at us | when we stop

thinking of it | the lakes will dry up

the seas will overflow | the smallest

storm will bring us down | a flood

will wash into my building | leaving

us safe and dry with no place to hide

the last time I wrote you | a poem

I did not tell you everything | kept

the story inside me | always have

we are filled with stories | many

held in and away | from | inside

the chambers of ourselves | and

we know this is right | stories burden

the listener | detract from the lived

tale | the details of which we don’t

forget | but cannot articulate | they

live inside us | weaker than memories

still there though | waiting to be

again | we hold them in | we hold

them in | even when they don’t seem

to be there | we cannot tell what

we don’t know | and a story needs

an audience anyway | the story gains

power through the ears that have

heard it | the eyes that have seen it

the one who keeps it close | and hidden

I am slowly draining myself | of stories

of poems | of ideas and their articulations

every night I scrape | my might for an idea

of a thought | every night my imagination

shrinks ever more | soon I will have no

thought | and no way to tell it | I will sit

staring | at the curtain | waiting for it to

happen | to reveal is story | its essence

to imagine what it might become | but

most things become nothing at all | they

just disappear | they always disappear

we don’t hold onto them all | we can’t | we

have to identify which | we will keep

to bear forward as parable | some

scrap | of story that will resonate with

strangers | something to tell | to show

others | we are real | we saw something

we hear something | allow us to be real

and all I can tell you about this story is

it’s still there | it will always be there