to think
i might come to the end of my ability to create
new neuropathways
as i have done since childhood
there are too many things
i saved saying i would later learn more

and my secret hope lost
to some day come into my own
to finally scale
heights closed in clouds that swirl
and whose glimses I would forever uncover
in gusts of verbiage or in the dawn
of warming mind or evolved eyes

peaks separated
like neurons i would leapingly
traverse in electric bursts
now represent the parts of mind
unused like old stage scenes
large, gaudy, dim in storerooms

even hillocks i climbed
and deep valleys of memory
dug are fog filled, obscured

brilliance
(never seen, true,
but felt like the sun
behind cloud membrane or eyelids,
remembered in the heat of burned skin)
is unavailable even to the imagination
even to reconstruct from books
from another's words

here i have the brilliance only
of driving in the city
playing host, telling gossip in breakrooms
knowing the good parts of town
and what plants to eat