All our sorrowless stories

Waiting is unlike anything else. It takes no short-cuts through time; always the long way around through where the story lies. ~Aucassin Verdé

Which Bird Breaks The Light
For Jan

She sends me poems from the in-between place,
the place where pens are dipped into petals that
yield hues given them by rains, rains given their
reasons to release by all our sorrowless stories,
the fancy tales we tell in our sleep and send up
from deep pillows as breath to the waiting sky,
a sky happy to receive whatever is sent for it
knows it must hold everything that matters.

There are some things one can give only to another,
for that person alone and no one else, carried on
shoulders of titans, dawns seen by only their eyes
as they lie draped in veils of their mingleness like
lovers who cannot guess at which bird breaks the light,
light that cannot sense such gentle shadows as they
share, the curvature of rare geometries lost to the
failing perfection of pale tapers that chant them silence.

These are the lines she would choose, the patterns
of words that adhere to no set purpose, their dear
appearance seemingly random and without compass,
veering wildly margin to margin, mattering without
meaning to, but mattering nevertheless, speaking for
the parts of her she once believed might be missing
forever, long-slept yet stirring like the mute piston
of a bulb that moves both earth and sky but to become.

Joseph Gallo
May 4, 2009