"Nothing"

was my reply

when you asked what I was thinking

(which masked a lot of somethings,

but they were really nothing much).

the mizzen and the crow

the dance shoe piroutte

the salt that keeps me afloat

the back road taken at dawn

"She wants to run with you":

the old man and his dog

on a leash as tense as betrayal.

I stumble to explain how my nothing

conjures a brick-red barn, a bulb hung

naked and cruel through a windowless frame.

How it had once played host to

"a brutal fucking murder", or so I had imagined

in this inland empire of provincial terroir.

We flipped that something over,

back and forth along our walk.

But it was as fleeting as it was futile:

a dream in want of a history;

a nothing to keep me warm

and you forever cold, like a body

left sleeping in the cow shed.

Nothing but nothing.

The presentiment of a past foretold.

As idle as thought when left to its own devices.

flex cable noose

water table rising

feet pounding backbeat

tales that aren't for the telling

It all washes up along the foreshore,

then gone just as quick as it comes.

I could walk you through the shallows.

We could slide into the depths.

But there would be nothing for us to hold

that doesn't become something lost.

For to live is to accept nothing, without reservation.

There was no murder in the red barn.

No thing I could place in your palm.

No look I could gift to your eye.

Yet in the remains of the unsaid

we shared a restful nothing-but-time

and a memory of foreboding.

So when you asked me again

what it was that I was thinking

I replied that killers are known by their acts

and in the something of nothing we find our genius loci.

March 2026