The open mouth
If it gets so dark
that singing seems
to stop
like a final answer
to that constant question
would you find me
where I wait
in silent suspension
open mouthed or tight-lipped
and remind me back
to music
one faltering note
at a time
to the beginning of the first
song?
Would I know
what lives
at the bottom
of the first
breath to rhyme
with the heights
of the last?
Would it know
me? Could it
enter, even
then?
Morning
Somewhere behind a fence
a child, still breathing, dares
to ask.
Witness standing
Stars throb against the rim of what I see, and my reaching hands hold like waving a signal to the departed, We’re over here! Come join!
And in their winking response I glimpse the humor of their restraint before my limits. I always think the thing to bear is longing and never consider arrival, or the unspoken answer to the questions I’ve begged.
And where do you think we’ve gone off to? And which of us is missing, now?
First steps.
In the language I am learning, I can only falter, halting between words. I move from one syllabic rock to the next with unsure steps, their surface shining, wet, and try not to slip into the stream of all I imagine possible to say, if only I knew more of these words, how to handle their music well enough that they would hold we, floating like a pair of otters under skies that would still defy naming yet welcome the earnest try.
After Czeslaw Milosz
I was a sponge
suffering to behold
what I could not absorb.
Before expression.
To hear, I wanted you, the language that lingers on the tongue long before a word is spoken, pulsing reverb in the throat.
Next sunset
Remember after this song to seed the next shadowland of loss, following the fever of fences we built to keep us in, and terrors out, when in the shade of their heights they only heightened fears, when in the privacy of night, we meant to leap between those stars, counting.
Beyond ends
So much remains after fear and desire.
I am astonished by the last things to run
from the hearts of the living, into death
and by the running river of their return.
And stay
Unless you pushed us
from that amniotic round
of insular growth,
we could not live––
to unknow
its whispered secret,
to seek it out among
the throbbing body
of the rest of us.
Forms and function
An enfolded order has a way of highlighting the persistent presence of what many call a mess, a catch-all term to highlight the collective creation of living beings who will not submit to confinement or easy reduction.
