Remembering to Forget

What was it I knew when as a not-yet being felt
the imprint of an angel’s finger above my lips?
And soon will know, when the same angel of death
removes his index governing my breath?

For I know many things as a result of my forgetting:
the creak of a wagon wheel, the hum of a radiator,
the heavy silence of anger, the heavy silence of love.
But I do not know what I do not know,
since knowing what I know, I do not dare to know.

What I knew was nothing and nothing will I know.
Yet now, I have forgotten nothing, plunging into life,
into self, and detailed darkness,
distracted by the imagined fragrance of the stars
and by the thought of how I smell to them,
and by the prospect that everything makes sense and grants consent to me.

And so I’ll say, while I’m alive and beclouded by the vividness of this earth,
I would rather bask in the poetry of what is, than the truth of what’s to be.