OUTSIDE, ALWAYS outside, you said, outside the conversation are the answering mirages—the blur of pedestrians with their purposes, clouds parting and color rearranging, light staring with urgent eyes from within a retreat to shadow. Numberless things, you said, are indifferent to the inner churn of words reaching for the consolation of other words. Outside, you said, people fail to notice how expertly sadness is adapted to outlast death. For such a triumph, you said, the world contains no rite.
* * *
THERE IS, YOU said, no form for the unattainable, which bad poets long for and good poets learn to forsake. It was within your power, you said, to sharpen your lines to poems, but you made footprints of your wandering lines instead. Thank you for not chiding me. Thank you for being gracious. Poems, you said, should not last very long anyway—better they should surface briefly in the unattainable’s drift into speech and almost-speech. You ventured: the clearest sign of the holy is a poem's defiance of poetic nearness. I hear it, you said, in the rise and fall of your speech, despite the failures of your poems.
* * *
A SIMPLE RESOLUTION that struck me: not to confuse impossibility with inactuality. I already know that the actual is by definition possible, and I already know that what is possible is in itself neither actual nor inactual. Somehow it takes some self-reminding that what is actual can be also impossible. Or I can say it to you better: anything possible is a tautology of the possible. What is possible now must have already been possible up to now, and what will be possible must already be possible. The word “possible,” in short, is another name for the compass, the zero. When love between us proved impossible, this is not to say it became inactual.
* * *
YOU EXTRACTED the color from the blossom, submerged its translucent carcass in a glass medium, then dropped its blood back into the viscous chamber, where it did not drown. You set to raise winter in an inverted fall, to gather as sunken haze a scarlet banded sky. Night ascended, then day. You left the purified city to witness—to bear, from above itself—the coagulant spectacle below. What remained was the world's contingency stripped of storyline. It imitated your ache and your florescence, the weight of the bone black you made to sink, then sink up, oh up.
* * *
Hamburg, Germany, 2024