There won't be any more meaning
In this house, on these shelves;
Why are you surprised there is such beauty,
Why misery lingers?
Whatever it is they are trying to say
Has turned into why they say it,
Which no one will say;
It is as if unallowed
By begrudged and miserly souls ...
This one wants to please,
That one to be forgiven,
And this one to remember what she was
Before she became bored at how ordinary her life seemed.
A fog of fact comes tactlessly out of that,
Like a hand from a deck that allows some truths
To be played, some hidden, some impossible to risk.
It is a game of snatches and murmurs
Of endless surprise, unrelenting confusion,
That forms into stories as others join in
Their own inability to fathom experience,
Their awkwardness at recounting what they've heard.
And the stories turn, in time, to something more,
Some form of belief that becomes something firm,
It seems, enough to keep talking, at least,
Of things they'd forgotten they'd said,
And ideas they discarded with too little fanfare
Too many years before.
There's something they need to learn
In all of these others, their endlessly dissolving
Faces and voices, about themselves,
How fragments appear something whole,
And a whole is only an egg to be cracked.
