for Toni Wilson
Love is someone I want to tell everything to
and then don’t
Someone with whom I rehearse
imaginary conversations
they will only ever read.
Withheld intimacy
concentrates
into incantation
finally betraying
years of formal
and infrequent dispatches
like an actor’s silence that only becomes revelatory
when it is broken.
But you died before I could finish even this tribute.
Someone called me when it was too late
and I couldn’t even tell you
I was thankful
and filled with regret
that you didn’t know
the magnitude of that thanks.
I could only realize it here
in the course of a poem to commemorate you
that perhaps it didn’t have to be an epic.
We could have put on Seneca together instead
something truly unstageable
He is meditating, either attending to Tantalus’ GHOST or else inventing him
You couldn’t resist the temptation
to stage the unspeakable gulf
between what can be experienced
and what can be expressed.
How could I know there wouldn’t be time enough to unspool each thread into its own filament?
How might you have received the lesser thread?
There is no recompense in the warmth of the writing of it
and yet, my beloved teacher, I continue to write.
Click here to see the live reading at Lockdown Poetry Jam.