By the Time I Put my Pen Away

Two appealing faces lent their graces to me several days ago –

or was it several weeks, three months, a year? That’s part

of what they may have come to prod me to remember

by appearing here – that to appear had not had any purpose:

anyway, beyond what might occur to me to fabricate because

I needed meaning: they hadn’t come to tell me who they were

in time or space beyond what they aroused in me by being seen:

seeing is the thing, I glean, that they had beckoned me to lean

into: to press my awkward essence into untoward flow,

become with them a medium, an estuary, liquid, salt and fresh,

aligning in the ways that chicken soup, they say, address

the aches and fever in the virus-ridden flesh: designing, with me,

some unprecedented opening. This duet of visages, I then

decided, were the risen and collective manifest suggestion

that two points-of-view could more than theoretically begin to link

with mine, whatever mine was: indeed that such a confluence

was happening already! – and once I knew it was, I’d know

at last I’d made a serviceable verb of “think.” The brink they

brought me to was not a rift: the lift they taught was what it meant

to generate a breathing thought. Only then might proverbs gain

a pulse, could Word approach the Flesh and gird the cosmos

with its latticework of joined ecstatic differences: the gone, the here,

the old, the new, now steamed into a life-begetting stew, to swallow

which would be what a Communion symbolized: the sole soul food –

the soul itself, the pelf beyond all other wealth, the art the heart

imparted. I’ve no idea, of course, if this is what they’d wanted

to convey. All I can say is by the time I put my pen away, they had

departed. I nearly said summarily. Assonant with verily. Capricious

fizz, this tic, this specious rhetoric! Is that what meaning is?

Reflexive speech? Maybe that’s what they had come to teach.

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