Only The Sun Makes Sense

Nothing that they told us was true.
You can't even begin to add up
the sidelong looks, the gestures of eye and hand,
the sudden intakes of breath. And why?
We worried and worried but in the end
The light was so intense
that none of us could have seen the others,
even if we had been thinking of anything but light.

The buttery taste of saffron, the yellowness
compounding --
The shadows of leaves,
the shapes incised on the wall --
a listening --
Still this longing,
Still this longing.

Lets get naked you said, and we got naked
because naked is what we do, it's the language
we spoke in the old country.
Listen, we try to listen, and the train whistles
red-shift into the distance. All those galaxies
fleeing from us.

I wanted to write manuscripts
illuminated, interlaced, fretted and twined
with letters ornamented so intricately that
you couldn't help but read them beautifully;

And as a ten year old I carved with a ballpoint pen
“remember me” into the soft wood of my bunk bed
imagining the dislocated floaty feeling of the person
assigned to getting rid of the words. Somebody,
somewhere, sometime, would have
to erase me intentionally.
Not a large victory, but I took what I could get.

And again. Nipples like gumdrops
or like new flowers,
warm flesh, eyes
bright with tears:
Where can we think to, that we have not already been?
None of us makes sense
None of us makes sense
Only the sun makes sense.