Aural imagery
I saw a sound. It rattled the bones of the last days of a time. That time of frayed signposts. Or times. The time was current. The time moved past futures. The time was possible, and all of us at stake. Now I watch for it everywhere, in hope of hearing. It is everywhere, but my eyes are not so good, having been too thoroughly trained by all that would erase her appearance.
Set alight
The moment in flux––all danger, possibility. Turbulence of arrival within the dream where each other is the heart of each I, drumming.
In an aftermath
Maybe what lasts after endings is this
wind as song stripped of technique
bells as sound of fallen leaves, light
a riot of color, firing life–––––––
and stars as receivers who curve
long necks of shine to hear each
prayer in context at a distance
to reveal how this planet for now
at any given moment still pulses
with these voices of us reminding
us please–– and dear–– and help––
beyond the beyonds of this all.
Shining sound.
In the stillness what spoke we knew to hold us inside an impossible hour against the radiant blaze of sky-bright sea, looking back.
A prayer to the wind.
I am, in the end––and each beginning––no more or less than a hollow vessel strung with sympathetic strings. If awareness is a matter of tuning, subject to interference, all that happens is a matter of sound, sounding. Each new life, each cataclysm is what vibrates through a given string, to wind through the echoic box and out again. Now I am symphony, now grass, now a spool of thread; now current, now whale, now cresting foam over wave. No part may translate itself.
Withdrawing even from myself, I am none of these parts, but all of them, and the handler breathing somewhere in the rupture between what is and what appears. In this state like dormancy, pregnant with possibility, I have never been an adequate expression, beyond this whispered invocation into wind, water, and this lover’s touch––
––calling, sound me, that I may remember. Heal my unbelief.
***
Adapted from An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry in which philosopher Timothy Morton expands upon Percy Bysshe Shelley’s idea that all humans are like aeolian harps.
