Start This Record Over

---

Perhaps is a new and sudden way of being.

Like satisfaction yet begun or some other kind

of kindness:

a more gentle one?

Night makes us all into the middle

of something until we aren’t

anything anymore. The sky

isn’t any color here. It’s okay

because consolation is color enough

for your cheeks, wind-bitten and glorified

by the light of the wine in this glass draining

toward a better time, a better space. I invented

a notion of hell and you invented a notion of hello.

Amazing similarities and bizarrely coincidental snow.

Like a twig falling from an oak’s tallest point,

I keep wondering when forgiveness

found its way into this world

in a time before bargaining and beckoning.

It’s quiet again and now the sky is a tangled

mess of rags seeking out the bored and unwilling.

I’d like to make a map not of the land

but of the path I took to arrive in this place,

a map with no idealized purpose,

a map of a thousand airless pines.