The Cradle Which Once Sang is now Silent


I see your face in front of a setting sun,
soft E dissolving into minor sound

like railroad tracks at four in the afternoon when freight trains pass

on their way downtown, to congregate in
the industrial basin by the dry oxbows of a slowing river.
The activity in your eyes

is a flurry of snow, that mellows into Chardonnay,
then a debate about profit by association

and doors swinging open and shut – blinking eyes and a smile curled

into a perfect violin G.

You move your conductor fingers through your hair,
orchestrate a coven of words on the precipice of your lips
and sing an excuse

as you sail untouched through reality air. A world flares and dies.

I pick up consonants and vowels, arrange
and rearrange them into different tonal landscapes

until you might have said almost anything. That’s the way it is with Archeaology –
suppose and suppose again.

I sometimes hear nothing and it’s a beautiful song because I created it.
I sometimes hear the truth

and it becomes twisted into the voices of
ten thousand people in a crowded space. I sometimes shut out everything and watch

the tic in your left eyebrow, the way it falls and rises like tides.
There are times when you can carry me and times when
there is no support.

I sometimes hear a train on overused tracks complain. It transports
our heavy freight to tomorrow’s negotiated events.