Brevity

Discourse
Forrest Hamer

And I said to him, we are continuous,
And whatever the self is, it is never
As we would consider, so I don’t believe the possibility
Of speaking too much of it; and he says to me,
Continuous, exactly, with what?

What about the body: something is always pulling at it
—gravity, responsibility, the life after this one.

My siblings and I don’t speak to each other
As much as we used to. When one of us calls, we talk
About the care of our father, our aunts, and then
We talk about the children. In the pauses, we acknowledge
How different from each other we’ve become,
And each of us somehow considers how much
We miss the way things briefly were.