Converse
The bedroom window was a slab
of night, a small boy kneeling inside.
Bid by my dad to conjure you, Infinity,
I guessed our talk would be
a volley of perspectives,
transacted in English.
Dear Heavenly Father… and
then silent years compiled in me to recognize
that silent eons could be your reply.
Dear lush void —
Dear fire slow and cold as peridot —
Dear skyless forest steeped in fresh light —
You palimpsest of all perspectives,
touch tethering each atom-crumb to balance
me with folded fingers, there, here, ever,
at the trembling equipoise of stars.
Without a medium there can be no sound.
If there is air, we touch, even across silence.
Sound is caress across distance,
as converse means both opposite & speak.
Vibration derives from tension, longing
to be there over here: me within you,
a music invoked from opposites.
Humming in the listening air, I’ve never been alone
but numb.
How long until I join the song I’m from?
Dissolving and resolving,
our songs become magma-thrum
or glide aloft the ghostly clef of bats.
Here in the Great Lakes State,
I am reading about dolphins
whose chantings carry back the forms
hidden in squid: a shell-beak, a sac of ink.
Deaf to those registers, I probe the cornices of mine,
rolling sounds around my mouth.
I bow and greet
the moss-blessed rock—
Does my voice bear
the feel of grit and velvet back to me?
Like dolphins’ essence-hauling songs,
our words burr and snag
on certain facets of Reality: blame or hope
A dictionary’s billion incantations skim
something from the brilliant deep.
Something of us, scattered there.
A sweet patina of cliché, of others’ usage,
covers my tongue, this public thing:
a daily language, a communal sense
which Cicero calls the ground of oratory.
A vast wind is partitioned among our lungs,
into mild greetings.
Not oracular, the breeze twitches
a leaf in the thicket,
while robins’ calls embellish the air
with little syllables: Hello. Hello.
Each thrush’s curlicue of song is woven of neurons,
a bird-brain stretched across the canopy.
“Our conversation is in the heavens”, writes St. Paul.
We live in the unfolding minds of others.
In a few paces, the forest thins into meadow, indefinite
as the penumbra of the self.
The shape of the grasses matches
the shimmering wind, the tide-combed clouds.
“Let there be commerce between us.”
Image of God. Echo chamber of God.
Prayer in the caverned mouth,
that little vestibule of sky.
Words abide there,
hermetic, seeking illumination.
The cypress in the mind. The inflorescent
meristem, the mind.
Brother Birch, Mother Maple, you feel
how light wrings our voluble thanks.
Tar-lunged, char-lunged, now I harbor
less of the sky in me.
The ache in my sternum, oil-beetle-black,
seed of a dark fruit
is a pact I have made with earth,
with growing death — through death,
rather, having trusted distance less
than contact.
My moments so precisely crammed,
what will it take for me to give
myself to those yawning gulfs
— sail-thin?
To open up a measured word
to the blanks it breathes?