witness to the non-arrival

“Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”

—René Magritte

i.       echo logic

 

some inherit land, and others silence.

I took in the riddle of loam—

where the unspoken ones are buried

and in the vapor rising from forgotten

names,

 

the echo of their absence         bewildered

my mother                              tongue,

a language orphaned of reply.

 

Her grammar hewn from hunger,

 

each clause         reaching

through         absence.

 

I once sought solace in mathematical logic,

certain its order might spare me—

 

but even there, I found

only

 

houses of unreal numbers—where i

was summoned to hold a place

for what could not exist,

to keep the real

from falling in.

I met you in the reverb of that search

beneath a purple bloom,

our heads upturned,

where a hushed oath emerged between

our woven words

—we called the thread

 

that held us there

Believing.

ii.       theory of nourishment

 

Hunger, too, spoke in a fractured grammar—

teaching how to dream of foods never tasted,

to imagine the feast like a number outside the line,

necessary but unseen.

 

And love—for the possibility of feeding someone—

leans me to become the sum

 

of hungers,

 

testifying to an empty room—

because if hearing is the last sense to leave,

might there be a witness?

 

someone to taste the echo

of the never-arriving feast—

 

its exquisite fat imagined, greasing

 

fingers, lips, the scent of what

we seasoned

with first fruits of new awe.

 

We shared a cookie. Found phrases.

Music. Under trees.

 

We named these small mercies like pilgrims

in a desert, praying over           crumbs.

 

When we walked, the shadows of violet petals

waved              gray specters between our feet

 

on the path unfolding beneath us,

 

and in the reverence of a Tuesday afternoon

you taught me

to say jacaranda, and by your    hands

 

I was smuggled from vapor to bone—

to bear the weight of a table

not yet laid.

—at its center, an absence

fluent in holding that space.