by Keetje Kuipers

To explain, to chart, to graph
what has lasted this long and what hasn’t.

To take the temperature, not with the back
of the hand but with a thermometer. One hundred
thermometers. One thousand.

To correlate, categorize. To count
stacks into stacks. To assign significance

—to a woman, a bed, toast spread with jam.

We make meaning faster than we can understand it:

Listen to the body only
long enough to ignore what it says. Discard
each explanation we uncover.

But in resorting to words—

But if it becomes a story—

Seven years without her was a glacier,
a delicacy, an unquantifiable
quantity.