I write poems when I’m speechless, or otherwise at a loss for words whether spoken or not. This one is a re-write. I’ll just leave it here.

Fallen Meditation

I sit down to write a letter.

What I know from experience,
comfort a step off O Luxurious
a posteriori
where the realm of having-done
remarks to the inner sensibility
sensible enough to ask,

How is this known. How is that known.

– what was known before.

The door may offer possibilities:
it may swing open, or shut, or it may
start to close, then stop,
fall off its hinges into the “room of things known”

open for inspection, analysis,
asking what is this. An answer
tearing quietly through the air we breathe
toward how is this known, how is that known.

Other things coming through the doorway:
A nudge of ants.
A file of drizzle.
Second-hand smoke.

I sit down to write a letter.

What I know from experience:
Train. Open window. Night.
Unconscious and literal, the answer might be
my desk next to the window, a railroad
track going past, which I’ve come to expect,
love, the shaking of its rails
east, west –

What I mean to tell you is this:
when I sit down at my desk,
the window next to me is already open,
already the cool and dark star-glint, and since
I’m in some state of undress when writing at night,
all flickering finds my skin
open to gusts passing
probably to Quartzsite.

Anyway a train
stirs the air and the three become sublime –
train, open window, night – and then
I know why

and what I wanted to say.

What I do know.
What the aperture in the wall excludes from oblivions
more realized and independent of anyone’s
search for answers.
Nothing some particular.
Nothing some concept,
what kindred body of problem – what
passes through here, what filled the room before passing,
no longer known.

Look at it looking at itself –

then the phenomenon losing interest,
wandering out,
leaving muddy footprints where rain
moistened the tile.

(collage I made c. 2003)