What we know, we come to know
by its undoing: there is no permanent
exhibit here. Like August stars, we offer
temporary light, our lives measured
in latitudes of loss, the longest distance
between any two points in time.
And, errant, we are covetous: the humble
vase broken by Marcel Proust re-glued,
imbued with preciousness. He believed
that grief develops the mind. What is
the mind if not that surface upon which
the world can be endlessly rebroken?
You hold me in yours as you walk to the sea
and my clothes catch on brier and bramble.
The view familiar, like a page from a book
we once wrote, its single copy, in a library that burned.