Mario stirs
from a dream where he’s become
a children’s book.
He looks at the clock
and thinks, “I need more time.
I don’t know how I begin.
I know where I am supposed to end
but that first sentence, how to lead
a child into me…it is not there yet.”
He falls back into
his pages
and finds himself
staring at that first white leaf.
“There ought to be some
huge illustration here, bursting
with all the colors,
and one line that sets me in motion
and makes me irresistible,
but nothing comes to mind.
Why would I as a child
would have wanted to know
this story? Maybe
there is no beginning
and I’m a pure middle,
graspable once I’m formed
but hard to enter. Would I
as a child have made an effort
to look into me as I am now,
or would I have been ignored
in favor of another?”
Mario dreams on
as his daughter tosses and cries out
in another room, another house,
and Daniel, the new man her mother married,
rises to comfort her.
Dan reads her a story
full of moon and stars, mice
and fishes and bluebirds and turtles
who speak in rhymes of lovely things
set in a full home, a place
with no blanks. She falls uneasily into
her own incomplete dreams.
Dark Matter 
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