The Proffered Hand

You could burn every clock ever made and I wouldn't mind. You could grow the perfect rose, too. Reheated coffee tastes different, depending on the mug it's in, which is part of what I am getting at re: form. We were lost in that diner a long time, exiting as if from a singularity, and I still couldn't love you the way you wanted or needed, could I? Loneliness teaches us what we have yet to learn about how to love, which is obviously why I spent so much time with it. Response matters whether you're drunk in Burlington, Vermont or sneaking into a Dublin convent. What you don't share remains a secret and to that degree you go unsaved. Unclothed? Unrobed, maybe. Metaphors, of course, are essentially a form of violence, despite our sense that they are unavoidable. They aren't. Yet what a castle can't do, a cottage in the woods often will. It's fun to think there is a single note song out there and we are it but sooner or later you have to come clean about God and Love. I mean, snow falls and deepens all morning and it's the same old story as it ever was: we ignore the proffered hand in order to go on with crutches.