It’s like any other qualifier, it depends on where the context comes in. Sunny to sunnier, gray to deeper gray. That’s why each sentence trembles as it is comprehended, the knowing strewn from line to line, there’s only so much to go around. Whether taken as venerable ancient or beardless youth, there’s only so much time you can take. This is where the words may gutter, this is when the end is nigh. Each of these pieces written well past the point of writing, just the longing for the last.
Each moment comes loose when the wind sets things astir. There at once the furthest star, the sweep before the depths. There’s time to set a timer, time to count, time to tell. The empty so much more than arms and pockets, the hole clean through you, the cause that you caught as yours. It is there when the walls creep with shadows, when the ceilings are feathered and fondled by the ideas that spill out of your mind, the colors that you see clinging to the words on the marked up page. A rewrite might have saved your place.
So little left to take up a shelf, a postcard, a busted cup, fragments set by tense and the weary hand of fate. The song in a tumble, the soul on a tear, the starlight and streetlights and the brake lights of traffic hinted at across fields and between fence slats. The sound of that barn owl you never really see though you place it roughly in the sky. There the moon, there the memory, there the map you still fold and mark. The words in pursuit of the worthless, something to say when this insistent last arrives.
