The joke

We joked a lot...When all is said and done, when you are finished counting all the sun rays of the day from intrepid dawn till squinting dusk, you won't deny you joked a lot. But it is not so much the laughter that remains. It is the blinding light chowing your sight like the dentition of a lion. 

The abrasion of a dandelion's fluff capriciously blown in your eyes. 

The infallible nod of fall to all the shrugging, blasé trees of summer.

The breathless draft a Northern loon's feathers will give. 

The prying call of a concerned quail slicing the idling painted desert. 

The taunt. 

The spite. 

The poke, the bile, the stunt, the shock.

The humors.

The- did-I-say-that and the-yes-I-said-that...now-what?

 Unreal, unreliable and unguarded, the referent of our jokes was always somewhere in the stratosphere, far removed from any sense of the daily course, basking in the eternal shadow of the obscured and iffy. You used to say: the truth is known, why bother speak of it? All the implied wisdom came from you, all the suggestions of disquiet uncover me. Between the trial of your steady soul and the commitment of my probing mind: a chasm of untelling silence and foretold failures, all the untold jokes of the world. And, true, you never said: Our joke is known, why bother speak of it?

The stars were always known, unknown was just their blueprint in the night.