It’s the hollow sound of a toast to fill the silence of unaddressed questions,
the celebratory clanging of glass on glass
ringing from assumptions based on past experiences and theories
from synapses of protagonists or all
that is mystical; a god or a God
for the rhetoric of bad days; the precatory shoulda, woulda, coulda’s
you can count with all digits and the humdrums,
the lalala’s to songs with lines you can never remember.
It is to fill in, with pencil, the
blanks of unclear intentions, capricious endings,
the what comes after the highest number, tentative now, for it is a trick question,
the true stories of Bermuda Triangles and Altantises,
for the ones Amelia kissed goodbye and all that is brief,
promises neither broken nor kept;
some, hypotheses for what happens after waiting.
It is the makeshift certainty ascertained the day he left
all these unfinished, unanswered, incomplete… things. The sure of it
invented by staking everything in a nebulous something,
a nebulous anything that will have to do, like cotton patches
on satin dresses or saints for hopeless causes.
It was the invention to quench the constant
need to know, to fill the in-between start to end
for all that we can not stop. A made-up map by pirates below ten
for every time we must set destinations beyond unchartered unknowns;
a make-believe place holder to hold us to the relief
we get from closure when
the universe gives us none.
It is the lemniscate, the amen,
the St. Jude we assign to our altars
until we find actual satin or the aviatrix herself,
or surrender everything in the spirit of faith
or believe
that not all things unfound are lost.
