Ten Thousand Things Arising
Not even if is a wildfire in close enough range.
Not even the present is within breath.
For years the answers came, the same
answer, or not the same at all,
spotted in a different tongue, then none at all.
The soft filling of the future tense
that would not fit into a grid, one I could name.
And right in the midpoint of what I thought was mid-
life, a new character padded onto the page.
Who traveled from the long after.
Leaking the afterlife.