‘Berries’ and other poems

Not Now

Nabokov said language
has many forms of
quiet kindness, refusals
of stark alternatives:

never can mean not always
and impossible
may mean not now.
How many times have I

opened a letter in search
of the hopeful word
and found only its shadow,
its empty promise.

And yet I keep reading
the lines to find
another possibility
in the very syllable

already spoken,
...