There's much to write in the Book of Rememory,
but the censors are all sleeping in their darkened attic rooms

so they cannot hear the way the bats above them wake
into what they imagine as yesterday's night. First they roll

their small and avian shoulders back, the ball in socket
sounding like a violin we once heard far down the block

walking long ago at night. Perhaps you did not hear it.
I thought it was scribing all my life out into the sky

and because the city's broad pink haze had blocked them out
no stars shone and so I reached your hand, but mine was so slow and heavy

it was as though it were a boat I had to row great distances,
half again as far, and half again, again, until you reached me.

It was, I think, then I loved you first. Perhaps you did not hear it.
But in my head I became the one white alpine gentian,

scaled and reptilian, Van Gogh walked down from the mountains with,
his ear cupped to its petals, then painted again and again

as all the suns that went into it. Convinced he had it right.
The gentian on the window sill, bowed and brown, blessing him and weeping.