Sound and type are blurred
And the meaning is absurd.
Because it is only one word,
We can ignore it with impunity;
To do so might be no pity.
And yet, the only of its kind,
Without it language would be blind.
I cannot easily say it;
To try would betray it.
I don’t mean as in reveal,
But to render it less real.
It lies in its tomb,
A yellowed volume.
Unearthed, it will bloom.
I found the image in the attic,
In the half-light blurred, static,
Like a votive, intensely vatic.
In a shadow box, five white stones
All shaped like finger bones
Arranged in a question mark,
A gesture beckoning a dark
Something beyond conceiving
Into the emptiness of believing.
I took it and nailed it to a wall
Downstairs, only to watch it fall,
Its glass crack, the stones scatter.
I think they no longer matter,
But I’m wrong. I see them still,
Years later. They won’t, and will.
They're like ghosts no ghost can kill.
To the echo the mirror said,
“You repeat until you are dead,
While I’m an eternal ‘instead,’
Light’s reversal that cannot fade.”
The echo replied, “fade, fai, daid.”
Night fell — only light was afraid.
For Lucien Stryk
A strange word — an our
And a silent H that lours
Over us, a hidden power
Giving us us and taking
Us away — asleep — awakening.
Can a country be under a curse,
A few words of malignant verse
Chanted inside a racing hearse?
To hell with superstition!
No man, crowd, or institution
Has turned our nation sour.
The Mind has forgotten the hour
Can grow late
Growing hate,
Like an ocean filling with plastic,
Leaving life crippled and spastic.
The curse is proliferating thought
That the future can be bought
And as quickly taken away —
Only the loudest given a say.
Will the worst curse have its day?
From infancy, we’re in its guts,
The beggars and the golden Tuts,
Until, when the Whaler cuts
Through blubber and sets us free,
We dive and thrash the freezing sea.
Decades on we still remember:
We were like insects in amber,
Protected, even transported,
Blind, yes, our hearing distorted
By the aggravated rumble
Of its great heart. We were humbled,
Every one of us alone.
We each had our one whale to own,
Yet we escaped to live or drown.
It. It? What is it at the source?
We can’t know it by stealth or force
Or guess at its speed or course.
Like one word buried in a book
(Moving like a trout in a brook
That will not rise to the eye,
That will not rise to the fly),
Read once and lost between covers,
It stymies the question — hovers
Just beyond comprehension,
Beyond time and dimension.
It depends on what you know
Less than water needs wind for snow
Or an arrow a broken bow.
