The Poetry Project

What If Nothing

Marc Solomon

What if nothing’s wrong
With telling what you saw
Say or felt, a sky harboring
Its moon, a fog its un-
Certainties, your questions
Returning to corners mistuned
Instead of breaking into mirrors?

“Demoted pitches arrest all
Safeguards”, disposition makes you say, or
Would, if you felt saying could make it
So, or nearly, or only bestowed a touch of
Loss rendered tuneless by hazard.
Have you mislaid again those
Hours before night becomes day

When secrets come round shearing
Daylight of its penetration, green
With music, not summoned nor longed
For, obliging only in its persistence?
You wish answers could depose
Their questions without leaving
False notes to raise a stir and start:

“Look, by what degree of
Hesitation does daylight
Confuse silence with abandoned
Fingers rehearsing intervals
For measuring insistence?”
It’s a shame to call from hiding
Blind questions re-concealing

What will never unveil itself. You
Keep your secrets folded. Secrets
Keep theirs under shelves
Open only for curtain calls.
What have we stumbled upon? Another
Concert? Another question? A mil
Of dross? Or merely a scrim of

Incompletions, at cross-purposes
With every… not secret
Exactly, nor answer; no flat
Question, but goad toward
Statement restated for aims beside
Themselves, inside something, that something,
Pert and roiled, “purdy while it lasts”…

Work from “Just speak nearby” with Kimberly Alidio

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