Let’s start in the middle, as usual. Ever since I burnt my mouth
I talk two ways, first as reluctant explainer, then as someone
offstage
In a dream, hushing those who might wake you from this
dream,
Imperfectly got up as a lutanist. Then sighs, whirrs, screeches
Become so much its fabric that one listens to see what words
materialize
On the windowpane this time. I don’t want to make an uneasy
habit
Of this though, because when the universe does turn into a
horror movie
It will mean Japanese undershirts for the kiddies and unusual,
invisible Demerits for those of us caught talking back at the screen,
unless, of course,
The unnatural peace God predicted for us has settled like a
giant shell
Over the ocean floor, in which case we shall all be forgiven
and forgotten,
Like students in a correspondence school. And I mean what
shall be saved
Of us as we live aimed at some near but unattainable mark
on the wall?
Not, one fears, a thing of hitherto unheard-of compacted
density
That might relieve all the years with spaces in them, years of
leggy growth,
Too much foliage, the wrong light, the wrong taste to things.
There is so much we know, too much, cruelly, to be expressed
in any medium,
Including silence. And to harbor it means having it eventually
leach under
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