The love of form is a love of endings. —Louise Glück, ‘Celestial Music’
What if it’s somehow like the end

of a good, a well-told story?

Then you’ll have completion,

have, better still, completeness.
The reckoning will be a rounding off,

an arrival so well foretold

by the setting forth the journey

will have seemed all along a return.
All questions will be answered.

Should the sense signal loss—

or, worse, disaster—even so,

at the sound of the last cadence,
when the long rhythms of the telling

lapse in a great easing fall

that finishes the whole,

prepare for a lift of startling fullness.
Let the speaking word ebb as it will

at the close, not hurried or slowed.

You’ll feel the rightness of silence

and space.