mmccxlix

Things I Would Say But Can’t

                       Wanted to know about making art and telling the truth.

                                                                               —Rachel Blau DuPlessis

I should have moved forward a little bit,

like five years,

read page fifteen,

came back home. 

Come back home

and buy a bunch of purple tulips,

very tight ones

that last longer.

Time travel makes

tulips last longer,

makes them tighter, after all.  But

what got squeezed

into?  That almost unforgotten

page from over

fifteen years

ago.  How does

almost unforgetting

happen?  The French

have a saying about it,

if not an actual theory.

I left the tulips in the

Museum of Visual 

Honesty.

As I lie here, 

dying, do I 
still wonder?  

Now what kind 
of mantra is that?