Eland Sky

“I don’t think I understood poetry until then.
That it was real,” he says. The link goes quiet.

Then lights up, some time later, with one
last thing; a yes after the final no
and a path to an infinite, scarless sky
where the eland wanders, her dewlap
mixed in with the milky way
and in the background mountains, feeling
that some memory must open now,
must rustle forth from these prehistoric caves
where first we painted, yes, where first we knew
what we might be before the stars,
before elands or mountains or lions or kings
and long after both yes and no are done,
before anything is won, or nothing lost.

“I think poetry taught me to chose what is real,”
we muse, stepping out the marvelous,
mauling the meaning of conversations
that make of ordinary moments poems,
that make poets gnostics, incapable of understanding
the choice but knowing how to make it, over and over,
if only to have their hearts break open
in the light of an Other who has guessed
that these vast grass plains are never lonely,
not even when there is just one thing.

One whispered, lovely nothing.