Even the Apocrypha make sense when you can’t see life for
the vision of it. In spite of everything we don’t know, which is
Everything Minus Us, nobody offers believable explanations.
Take that as a good sign. No one speaks on the ferry to Martha’s
Vineyard, either, and yet it gets us there, to a new shore, which
after several days or centuries resembles the shore departed
from. No details needed when a place describes itself. (Is is good
as said, as Stevens might have written on the way to a poem.)
Imagined truth rolls bones with doubt. The question cannot
hear the questioner, and finds itself framed, in a museum, the
subject of a pamphlet visitors pocket but don’t read. Walking the
perfectly arrayed bricks of Edgartown, you might pass expensive
cars in which lonely dogs bark as if they knew something dark
about you — an eighth grade prank that ended in sirens, what
you told your spouse about the scar on your abdomen. Dogs
seem to know everything that has never been recorded and
nothing that has. Now, while you’re away from home, rumors
could be percolating through the damp soil of your back yard,
spreading beneath the lawn like an invisible fungus, preparations
in motion. On your return your friends will greet you differently,
like someone they knew once, years ago, but thought had died.