How I Tell the Same Story Over and Over

The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.
— M. Merleau-Ponty

Have you heard this one? Stop me
If you have,                
El Barto is telling tales again
And I can't remember if I already said this out loud.

Time is an empty bowl, A nice one.
                                                        Hand-thrown
And marked. Inscrutable shapes
                                    Pressed into its underside.
A triangle which is a triangle and also not a triangle.
I can't tell who the maker is.

I suppose it doesn't matter, really,
If signifier and signified collapsed
                                                  Like stars
And pulled us through with so much bent light,
The distance is the same,

                                          Infinite and infinitesimal.
In the halved space between us
                                You are impossibly far.

"I feel that," you say,
As you grab
             A handful of clementines and fill a bowl.
As if that's enough.

Suppose instead I stop talking altogether.
This time, you tell me a story,
Because I'm sure
                            There's a word for this,
I just haven't heard it yet.

Many thanks to Lisa Russ-Spaar for the prompt.