In the haunting silence that comes with night rain, she spoons closer to his back and rests her hand on his thigh. Her breath moth-wings on his neck. Across the room she sees rivulets on the window pane intersect, stop, dart left and right, arrive and disappear. It seems important to her to understand, to discover order and purpose there, to see signs of courage or fate or helplessness.

But she finds nothing—no significance, not a hint of forethought, no rhyme, no reason why rivulets move here and not there, why she feels so much bliss one moment and falls terrified the next. It seems so perfectly imperfect—this moment just before she receives the blessing of not knowing and slips into the soft waters of sleep.

by what miracle
does the noise in us
become a song?

—Adapted from “For Patricia and Roy,” which appears in Gilmore’s collection of lineated poems Love Takes a Bow (Imago Press, 2010)

Bio: Dan Gilmore