Nel Mezzo

Alternate title: Sestinas: what can't they do?
Alternate alternate title: Sestinas: say less using more words than other people say with less.

In France they have drugs that improve memory
(I read an article about it at a time in my life
when I thought I’d carved a space in the wilderness
though I was as unsure of the path
as I was of anything). Anyway. The article described
miracles: sparse thickets of thought thickened into woods

But that was the problem really. I already had a wood:
a place bereft of reflection or of memory
(for those who walk unpleasant places do not describe
a path; these are not reflective joints of life)
a place absent even the memory of a path;
where all that is belongs to wilderness.

Wilderness
far from being just a wood
becomes an essential piece of any path
(path: a place within cohesive memory
that defines the whole of life;
that which edges describe)

And so: a line describes
an angle, and so a triangle is made. And out of wilderness
we make our life,
in amongst a wood
of shivers, thought and memory
and suddenly there becomes a clear way, a path.

(or I suppose it should be a path
though mine does not for sure describe
the way through brambles of memory
through the dark of the sleeping wilderness
in the thickness of the wood
or whatever. Life).

Midway along the journey of our life
I strayed, abandoning the rightful path
And found myself within a gloomy wood.
So hard it is in its aspect to describe
This savage harsh and fearsome wilderness,
That fear rekindles with the memory.

in the thickness of our life (strange as it is to describe),
there is (or perhaps could be) a path, a way inside and out of wilderness
into the wood, out of memory