[gentle music]
- Nicholas Gulig: Superior, by which I mean the lake
was not as much as we imagined it.
A synonym or else the surface cold
because the light was catastrophic in the distance.
No.
The water made of its appearances.
The presence of a promise forming shore,
the waves repeating and repeatable.
I had thought that I was making up,
was therefore under it,
the sky was strange within the world
at once upon but not itself belonging.
We looked away were other than
and then the day was not of what between us edged
growing into sand the dark dissolve
to something less than brilliance
the wind within itself a distance
yet again, a distance.
I had thought to ask it everything.
Our voices almost mattered making sense,
the lake is every kind of blue today, you said,
it is and it is cold, I know,
but what will come of it tomorrow.
I can't pretend what's left
that we without ourselves are shaking,
made of this material.
Or maybe it, what was it only mattered into,
formed itself from nothing new, a sound I said,
or else I only listened to or thought to try
but couldn't say existence is an exit
we have traced our lives to find it thus,
the line the trees have made behind themselves,
green and gray where people aged alone in separate languages,
the shade in which increasingly their names became mechanical,
becoming difference, always difference,
as if no other shore of light to hollow out or follow,
no path behind us, leading each into each other here,
where it, whatever is is never certain, love,
unless alone that we are possible in this,
the unkempt vacancies
of how between the beautiful and full of loss,
that I might reach for you
and find not only clarity, but solitude,
a terror turned to wonder, tuned to our despair
[gentle music]