Five Things That Can’t Be Proved
There are Five Things that can’t be proved to be,
cannot be held, be measured, or be seen:
Sleep, Love, Zero-Nothing, All, and In-Between.
You can be stirred from Sleep, and you can see
sleep’s effects, and can feel, under a cover,
a sleeping soul, but can’t, per se, see it.
You can love the world, or just a single lover,
but cannot actually perceive, to wit,
Love.
Nor Zero: Oh, sure, there’s none of some-
thing, but, like Zero, Nothing is a thought,
not a thing. You cannot see what is not.
And you can count all of X, but can’t come
within Infinity of All of All.
Such are the limitations of a soul
trapped by a mind and body.
And of these,
though Sleep might swell, it’s only Love which grows. . .
or glues the distance. . . or binds as it flows. . . .
Love is mysterious, unseen until
life is over, the Everything is Nil,
the mystery revealed: then a soul sees
Love for the first time—though we might except
a trillion lovers, and a handful of
poets, who’ve claimed, at least when they have slept,
to have actually seen what they call Love.
The way they talk at times, I’m loathe to doubt
them. So, between the days, I dream about
the universe’s souls as teeming trees
with one ancestor, possibilities
limitless, and the xylem and phloem
as Love, flowing inside, from root to sky,
invisible until the day we die,
or, In-Between, like blood and bile, which flow
both ways—All ways—at once, take root, and grow.
Grow what? Why, a miracle . . . a soul . . . a poem.