From Word To Word

This voice, a remnant and a harbinger,
Orphaned doubly, by its lineage
And by its inheritance, speaks nothing,
Nothing to be owned or guaranteed,
Assured or underwritten.  It is adrift
Between times, between unapproachable ends
And unrecoverable beginnings.

There is, through the window, a slender pine,
A shadow shape against a shadowed night,
A charcoal wick aflame with a hazed moon,
Pallid, flickering, and all adrift
Of the world, astride the pine’s upstretched peak,
The silhouetted ache of earth for sky.

I lay where the summer had surprised me,
beneath a tree, half lightning blasted, limbs
like roots burrowing into a blue, thin,
transparent soil, the trunk suspended there
above a green, impenetrable sky,
adrift between two heavens and two earths,
surrounded by long shadows, sun flung
and invisible, branches become roots
then cast, insubstantial, on earthen skies.

Breathe unuttered words through the night,
unspoken things less heard than felt,
like warm breath on a pillowed cheek,
hands brushing hands beneath linen,
the swelling of another’s sleep,
the silent and contented words
that rest about us in the dark,
like moonlight on a coverlet,
the singing of nocturnal things,
an arm beneath a lover’s head.

The song of cicadas thickens the air
between the rhododendrons like a fog
on the mountainside when trees gravely wade
into the whiteness like a sacred stream,
but now the soft pale sacred shore recedes
to the reservoir’s bright blue suddenness,
and the trees with nothing to hold them rush
in vastness to a shore they dare not cross,
for the blue is too sacred or too profane,
and they stand before it in endless rows
climbing into mountains, through the thick song
of cicadas mingling the scent of vined
white roses, like a vast host in worship
before a too sacred altar, their prayers
whispered to the drone of cicada song
the incense of small white roses on vines
that strive to be sacred fog on the slopes,
climbing by the count of years to the peaks,
and collecting trilliums in their wake,
and giving home to the discarded husks
of those who would mingle songs with white rose
to thicken air among rhododendrons
as trees worship a bright and sudden blue.