your grocery lists will rhyme
and your thank-you notes
sound like poetry
and you will hear—
cadences—
coming from your brain,
incessant,
in the silences between
the beats of your heart

write
because a controlled release
forestalls the explosion
that your creativity foretells

write
because the composition of phrase
makes it plausible
that order can be drawn
from your chaos

write
because if you do not
the words will tattoo themselves
in your dreams
until you dream of writing
and awaken, mute

Speak, so that I may remember, even though
the sharpest of my recollections will be
limited by the silences between your words.

It is easy enough to memorialize through
words and possessions, but the tangibility
of a vanished existence relies on the
remembrance of pauses between word and word;
hesitations between word and glance.

It is the spaces between that transform
recollection into memory,
and remembrance from storytelling.

This is the beginning of the forgetting:
of the transformation from you and I
to he and she. Look carefully; the blurring
began with your first memory. Do you not see
the haze of indistinctness creeping upon you?

When you die, grief will sharpen my memories
of you until you, too, blur into the color
of forgetting. When I am asked to speak
of you, I will tell them of the silences
between your words, and hope it is enough.

Between hand and fist, breath and wish,
everything shifts. Edge aligns with edge.
Points notch points. Trickles of deepest
blue slide from my palms and evaporate
in the eddying currents of the air.

Your fabrications come from lips and eyes,
dichotomies of faith and belief uttered
in glance and conversation. You define me,
wrongly, as a 'conjurer.' My fabrications
begin where yours meet their end.

II. Nightstand

The queen of forgetfulness bids me sieve
your soul, to empty out the coffee dregs
of passion's ache and recollections
of life witnessed and yet not borne.
I am not so assiduously kind as she,

who takes away both aches and answers.
I prefer to scatter gifts: the matterings
of what you cannot bear, like coal,
compress to things of beauty. They await
your discovery in the morning light.

III. Come Morning

For I am the bedsheet princess, a queen
whose ministrations you will not remember
come morning. My gentle fabrications
allow acceptance of the impossible.

All you will remember, come morning,
is a dreamless sleep which does not correspond
to the faintly wet and bluish streaks which
may have—once—corresponded to tears.