I search for a certain gentleness. 
—	not the gentle that shies away from naming the storm —

Consider: 
How the night confesses with twinkling stars even as it swallows the flowers.
How the empty quarter of the page cradles your eyes at the end of a sorrowful poem.
How the animal released back into the wild turns once: saying something, saying nothing, perhaps grateful, perhaps disbelieving, perhaps remonstrating, before running away as fast as its legs will carry it.

But the looking is rough.
And the feeling.
And the knowing.
And the unseeing, unfeeling, unknowing stillness. 
And want. 

There are enough words that offer to improve the day. Words with eyes of a stranger. 
Promises, I tell them, should be trees not clouds. 
There are other words that break me. Not from the edges, caving in. 
But inside. 
Until there are slivers and shapeless fragments swimming around where no one can see them.

In the taxonomy of gentleness, there is: 
The kind that picks you up, slowly: enough angle, enough balance, enough hands to gather all the pain. Enough time.
The kind that is the silent falling of a single cherry blossom. The kind without enough time. 
The kind that is the thread through prayer beads. Repeated. Time after time. 

I fold the sky into an origami box.
It fills with light and wind and things I cannot see. 
I dip my hands into its fullness. 
They replace what I could not see. I try again. Letting my fingers fall one by one, slowly. 
How do things empty? I imagine the scattering of birds in the shadow of sudden sound. 
Abrasive against the throat of the wind.

But there is —
the fog: the kind that blurs everything. All the lines and curves and colours and hardness turning into suggestion. Turning into possibility. Turning into memory. 
and the canopy. Melting light into shadow upon shadow upon shadow. 
and the shroud. 

All things dissolve in kindness. 
Sleep fills the empty hands of waiting. 
The wind shifts the shadows into a dance within a dance.
The night has had its fill. It picks itself up from the floor of the moon.
Tomorrow, if it comes, must come gently.