Equal, Always Equal, to the Inexpressible

That’s what the stoic said believing the pond of his own head

Flush as any flush thing, lake or sea, winter’s runoff

In the drink of eternity, the rock, the pulse of utter solitude

In which the only conversation is your own, single splash

Of a rose outside a leaded window, its inexpressible attitudes,

The train strumming by, the four year old drilling the floor

Above your head till you know you’ll soon be dead,

The trees’ thin crowns, not yet winter in their stammer.

You wish to take yourself inside the bamboo wind chime

Singing of Indonesia, rising among born-again cicada

Nineteen years under, some litany of home

Clacking in wooden bones. The lost art of repose,

The flapped, worn out blind of clicked, webbed time,

Serial surrogates displacing the places you’d been,

The touch of them nothing till you web them up again,

The mind’s muscle slackening in the saved chipped page.

Out of darkness the ear will lead us. You must be very quiet

To hear blind Milton chanting to his daughter in the space

Our century vacates. So the window of a single rose.

You sit there remembering your father reading

Sunday afternoons, a glass of sherry floating in snow,

Heifitz in Beethoven’s concerto, this wooden wind,

These insects slumbering through

Long gestations of some mind, conjured in quietude.