For what we will be

Uraab

For Karen

Tens of thousands of stories are lost. Ours is not yet
one of them. The child left behind when the wagons
rolled West without her. The family dog who thought
he smelled a rabbit somewhere down a flooded wash.
The lovers who went over the falls rather than not be
allowed to love one another. All things move to the sea.

Our story is but beginning like the first bird that wakes
before the dawn takes hold. The dark branch that takes
the black wing to hold it before the absence of the sun
as necessary as the ruby breast that catches its first ray
in a distant sugarpine ambered against the high ridge.



We are like levers of a complex instrument, the uraab
of a qanun, designed for performance in the accidentals
that move through lives we can scarcely measure out,
each interval an imperceptible rise toward another
future that might wait for us to catch up, or not, opting
instead to hold another against some nearby treeline.

That our story might not become lost as the most lost
of the least of these stories, we set it out beneath the
oaks, that dusk might lie its hush within it, that swifts
and owls and the hunt of hungry things might take us
into their whirling mouths, that we be remembered not
for what we were not, but for what we will be after this.

Joseph Gallo
June 29, 2012