this is not all

for Willa, a day in March at Bard

We know there are more seasons than four
and have seen most of them now together

Somehow things are not growing routine, but intensifying,
each tim deliciously, like crushing flower petals in your mouth,
deliciously, each detail driving tandem insane, the world fascinating and baroque.
You are staring at lintels and demons and architectural details,
the gargoyles that everyone passes by, graffiti on walls,
the remnants of some no one marking their passing.
You follow the curve of windblown snowdrifts and turn it into deserts for me,
because i have not shared the desert season with you yet.
realizing too late the poison of theory, we can savor the fatal taste of the brew,
nihilists yet, postmodern and still fighting, pointless,
no ones marking the minutes of our passing,
marking the infinity of our memories with diary graffiti, obscene and sublime,
tearstains like a wall that has been spat upon by a million passerby,
the weakness of laughter, the infinite power of laughter,
the laughter coming through, the running away, the season of sitting quietly.
this is not all
Fractally, the details multiply because, finally, we care.
There is no simplicity. There is no truth. Logic does not hold.
Coming to the center, we realize the boundaries have faded

As we speak of "intertextuality" among poems or myths in South India, so
we may speak of "interpersonality" among human beings there.¹

The center is no center. Our reason cannot hold down the pages, they flutter in the wind,
the narrative is fragmented, the characters blur together
yet somehow it is still a story. Bereft
of exposition. We are acting in a story a movie, an epic, and
it is our only duty to

Do it beautifully.²

                        to compose, improvise, create, reiterate, draw together,
finally (almost most important) to admit to the seams in the pastiche and call them beautiful as well.
To tell the stories of our families until there is a new mythology, until we forget when
the beginning was.
Somehow to make all this possible under the impossible weight of pure nothingness, but with love.
This is not all

In desperation is the only way we have found to live and live
we well do. You shift, we both shift, like spectra in a telescope,
or the wraith on the dim back stair. What we want is most crucial, it changes,
we want to be what we aren't,
or at least not to be what we are,
and somehow I have learned to be angry (aren't you proud?) and impotent
(i know you understand)

paralysed, flat on my back³

and more cynical and sometimes not so cynical (or just without any right to be),
and silly, more silly, and glad for all that because this is not all.
There are seasons to be invented. I am glad you are my friend, I love you,
happy birthday, happy Tuesday, the view from here is better even than a year's worth of time.

Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, "That's life."⁴

---

"..if you drink from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
However, this bottle was not marked 'poison,' so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast), she very soon finished it off."
-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland