The Death of Words

Secret Garden

—Photo by Cynthia Linville
 

I, OR SOMEONE LIKE ME

—Marvin Bell

In a wilderness, in some orchestral swing

through trees, with a wind playing all the high notes,

and the prospect of a string bass inside the wood,

I, or someone like me, had a kind of vision.

As the person on the ground moved, bursting halos

topped first one tree, then another and another,

till the work of sight was forced to go lower

into a dark lair of fallen logs and fungi.

His was the wordless death of words, worse

for he remembered exactly where the words were

on his tongue, and before that how they fell

effortlessly from the brainpan behind his eyes.
But the music continued and the valley of forest floor

became itself an interval in a natural melody

attuned to the wind, embedded in the bass of boughs,

the tenor of branches, the percussion of twigs.

He, or someone like him, laughed at first,

dismissing what had happened as the incandescence

of youthful metabolism, as the slight fermentation

of the last of the wine, or as each excuse of love.

Learning then the constancy of music and of mind,

now he takes seriously that visionary wood

where he saw his being and his future underfoot

and someone like me listening for a resolution.

______________________ 

—Medusa

Happy birthday to Cynthia Linville, and don't forget that TODAY is the deadline for submissions to WTF from Rattlesnake Press: See www.rattlesnakepress.com/wtf.html