Confiteor
        I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma,
        a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad
        attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
                                        —Umberto Eco

Apologies to the invisible,
the unknown and unknowable.
Apologies to the hazy upswell
I cannot make coalesce
into a mighty geyser.
Apologies to you, my love,
for my deficiencies of mind
and pocketbook. There is,
in this life, a multitude
of impossibles, and I feel
a personal responsibility
for them all. Maybe it's
the Catholic in me, or maybe
it's just innate stubbornness,
a motivating need to make
sense of it all. I know
we have the power
to invent and discover, and
we want to untangle
everything, but we are not
brains in jars. I tell
the swarm in me to hush
and, when it doesn't,
focus on feeling it rumble.
This is temporary.
Whenever I see blue
I think blessed virgin because
my world is a world of symbols
and saints, and it's a hard
lesson to learn that not everything
has that kind of weight.

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Copyright © 2019 Brianna Noll All rights reserved
from Colorado Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission