33

Just Out of Touch

One cannot say outright the heart’s most secret truth

but must speak shy metaphors,

tentative, oblique, poised for sudden flight

that guards the unsayable fear

when our two truths do not seem identities.

Thus if you say, “Your world is fading to shadow,

nothing is real,” your concern

is not for the mattered atom.

Or if I swear, “I hate them all, every one,”

could I ever condemn the fawnlike eyes of innocents

or unlove a love grown into my heart as its own substance?

So, as bees dance out direction and distances,

we circle, endlessly, just out of touch.

As do all men.

And so it ought not to matter, much. Only,

my tongue knows,

and yours should know,

the territory of each ambiguous retreat.

These lines my map and metaphor.