Part 39

Everything needs a name. As if to acknowledge the seen,
the felt, the dreamt, as they are, as the naked skin of a
sky without a single star, even a sky that you may never
know again. As if just letting it pass without a label

would seem like it never existed. I think of shadows,
shadows of fixed length, people shrinking and expanding
with the light and disappearing altogether at the end
of the day, disappearing to a place where the disappeared

gather, you and I at opposite ends, unable to move in
the darkness. What should I call it? What should I call
the reading of the last word of the poem and the
inability to go back to the beginning, to go anywhere

because that devastating silence that follows, is the poem.
And that is the reading, that being rooted in the debris
for as long as it takes for the universe to stop shuddering?
What should I call it? What should I call a question which

should never be asked like a candle should not be lit. The
lighting destroys it until all that is left is a darkness darker
than dark and the acrid smell of something that burned
and no longer is, like a life unlived, like a love unloved.