To say what you want
from a store of ideas
read in books, and turned
over in the mind like riverstones,
or to know who someone is,
or what they will reply and
having to say it anyway
is to remember the future as if
it were the past, and feel
the sheltered quiet of rustled
bedsheets, fingertips on a
freckled shoulder and know
that these images exist as
a gallery in the mind, a
library even, and to feel
the connoisseurship of light
as it fades to darkness, like
the shadows that fall on
the backsides of mountain
slopes, is also to imagine
all of the modes and motives
that existed or have yet to
exist amongst the smell of fire,
a Herculean labor of
forgetting what is
no longer of value.