As the flood of Light's communion
swallows me, draws me close,
I feel beyond the reach of this

reality to tell your story,
like sisters who must never part again.
For those you've touched, there's no

escaping: always revealed in small
particulars--a coffee shop, a street corner--you
reappear complete. And now as I address

you, seeing your vastness in a blade of
grass on College Green, I wonder:
what's to become of us? Anything, nothing?

Words are all I have to give you.

But after all, is not poetry but the best
means we have to speak the unspeakable,
to witness the invisible?

To know that you must have gone along that way;
I know too that I must tell myself--what it was I learned,
or will remember, from those frozen moments.

Although we hesitate to say that what it says
refers to anything that we could know,
Amanda, you and I know.

It's clear that at this juncture, I need
no other guides but you.

Your words
are on our hands and
in our eyes forever.

In your words we recognize
the animals and angels of our hearts
our longing, our joy, our despair, our hope.

And this moment, poised,
beckons me to dream more, expect more:
Could it all change with a word, a comma,
this urge to crease into a bird
and soar through the cosmos forever?

Could it all change with a word, a pause,
this unwavering conviction that
in one freefall moment between assurance and