Starfields vast and empty

Tabledance

A thousand and a thousand, a thousand before and a
thousand after, and thousands beyond. A thousand when
no eye saw, no ear heard but our own, heelscrapes along
the longest wall, the journey undertaken in a single thousand
steps, one by one by one left to the winds that keep them, the
rains that erase them, the hours that forget they ever passed.

To sit across a table to see the finitive gazing back, the
dearness our travel takes us through, the rough of it, the
loss of it, blissful misery passing through us in an instant.
We have always been the rivers we wept down, nothing
more, nothing less. Were it not so we would have instead
made our way here through starfields vast and empty.

No words, then, no words. We cannot imagine what to say,
what not to say. Sing through this silence with me and listen
to what it sounds to be human, the immeasurable loneliness
we must all hold for the sharing of it, that we might not go
in our time suffering in the false knowledge that what we feel
we feel alone, that another thousand will never be nearly enough.

Joseph Gallo
March 8, 2013