Through Which a Visceral Language Materializes

I knew you would argue dolphins, so blatant

their emanations, but you’d never guess radiant windows

is how I know my neighbor’s reconciliations.

The waver of leaves as I water at the root is found speech,

I speak charity for the ragged running rabbit stalked

by a voracious hawk, my soul in tatters taught grace.

Maybe you faced corn husks singing like demented tenors

the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye

and entered that rare atmosphere, where your body began

to run out of words.

Not all endeavor is holy. Often prayer strays toward gold,

confession ends in lame excuses,

and even when you profess, you shrink your mistakes

down to the size of a spitball.

The Big One, the psychically subconscious half-willful

dumb mistake you made

when you weren’t that young, the journal you filled

with every indiscreet thing you ever did

and now you can’t discard without reading first, without

the urge to keep turning the pages, inflicting on yourself

the maim of revived memory;

what will you do for expiation, pray? Send a check

to the trenches? Bend from the waist? Instead,

try entering a synagogue the final hours of Yom Kippur,

the congregation famished from fasting, and attend

to the sound of the shofar, the ram’s horn that once

warned of war, brought news of celebration, summoned

the tribes to waken and rise to what some call the Divine,

and tell me the hair on the nape of your neck didn’t bristle.

Or stand transfixed in an alley

in the old city in Jerusalem next to an open door

beside a church bruised by centuries,

the limpid notes of a young girl singing a cappella

an ancient Gregorian chant drifting onto the worn stones,

and try to hold back your tears.

Listen to the twined voices of the muezzin

chanting from the minarets in Istanbul, bring in to yourself

the weave of brio, body and bamboo

in the hands of a shakuhachi player, find a language for

Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis

hallowing the air the way Beethoven’s Ninth sanctified

the Nineteenth Century, and Presley, Pavarotti, Callas,

have blessed ours. It is possible to feel the earth thrill,

to retrieve our animal vocabulary.