The Orange Peel On The Stairs

You will now hear a story
with the usual opening
and closing words,
but in between? There is

a stairway in there.
We see the stairs
and hear the emptiness
of the stairwell and how it echoes

when the climber is done,
but none of that is in 
the space
we call the story.

The story tells us just enough
of the climber’s life to feel 
we know them but of name
or face there is nothing in the story.

We find a single orange peel
on the landing between floors
and all we know of that
is that the story was written

to hide the rest. If there’s
a moral, it’s unknown. If there’s
a lesson, it’s hidden except for
what we already know about how

what we are told conceals
the why of the untold parts: why
the sweetness of the orange and
the strain upon the body of the hero

are left unremarked. Why we are allowed
to see so little and yet become
so engaged, to pretend that once 
upon a time we all lived happily ever after,

even the people in the stories we tell
who lived mostly in the gap between 
the seen and the unseen and did not in fact
tell us anything they did not want us to know.