Verse 2

*II.*

On the subject of unnamed things:

There is a word in a language I don't speak for the light that comes just before the light you wanted— the one that arrives and does not apologize for not being what you were waiting for.

I have been learning this word for years. It is made of equal parts *almost* and *already* and a third thing that exists only in the moment before you've decided what to call it.

The names we give to rivers are the names of people who first said: *here. I have been here before.*

The rivers do not keep them. The rivers keep only the shape of the moving, the memory of stone, the sound that water makes when it has gone as far as water goes.

For the record:

I do not believe in unnamed things. I believe in things that have too many names to settle on one— that keep the others stored somewhere inside the first, the way light keeps all the colors it ever was.…