Occasionally I manage
to glimpse someone
I can never know

in the odd tilt of
one word or
the reflections on your glasses

and I wonder.

You complain of the softer
world's lack
of the definitions you
have become accustomed to
in your field of clear lines,
where notation is not
an abstraction and knowledge
may be clearly told.

I suppress a smile, knowing that
you have taught me
the lion's share of those
things that can never be said.