Because We Do Not Know
a new poem
Because we do not know the truth in love, what is pure need and what is primitive longing for belonging our choices are as perfect as they can be. Even years later we avoid the complex queries passed down from misery to joy—how we remember bright birds vanished in thickets of juniper or haze hiding an entire length of a beach into night’s furthest lightning. Because we do not claim to know the truth of love whatever it is we do to lay claim to it to dream the dream of it, the cruelties and unforgiven lapses... as well as whatever it is we try to escape but bring to pass inevitably, old tragedies, reunions, forgotten slights from the places we shared (dream of memory memory of a dream)… all combine. It remains uneasy. We follow some strong feeling that punch of blood that tells us this act is love when eventually it fails us for the most trivial reasons. Oh—I know our adolescence manages to follow us and even if we outlive those terrors and adventures we wonder with a kind of regret why none of this occurred to us before? How useful could it have been? How many heartbreaks avoided? It’s late now. What is revealed only through time’s passing never stops revealing. Ah. You mockingbirds there rehearsing someone else’s song, an entire race of lovely copies! When what we wanted was a kind of bell bird like no other, original as desert rain or how the wind explodes and still rises all around us even as we approach the end. “I can hear the ocean” you say, as this day’s gold light is fading. “Yes I can see the sea!”
