There is only one thing to be said
but we have yet to find a way to say it.
As consolation: all these languages,
and in these languages, all of these ways
to fail at saying what we need to say –
whether it’s by talking to our neighbor
who cannot speak our language but whose kids
come knocking every morning at our door
demanding play and tenderness and flight,
this man who’s asked us over for some tea
and makes a child’s hand-sign of a gun
to tell us everything we’d understand
of what his life has been, or whether we
choose silence in the evening when we’re home
to keep ourselves from empty phrases like
we are precisely -sort of- just the same –
as if exactitude and vagueness mixed
in just the right proportion might suffice.