Message to silence
The streets speak something of their history,
if you can hear it, if you have the time.
Singing and oratory of the past
are constantly at ear. There are big gaps,
time becomes dust to grow the coming present;
but the gaps in the gaps, the doors in the wall of the unknowable,
are so numerous there, one may glance back,
a pin man, printed in an open book,
seeing, momentarily, as the page is bent,
seeing the land he may not enter,
recalling without control the fragment
voices on tongues he can't repeat but hears
and almost understands, classification
of cadence and some phonemes, unclear
though as to the meaning. Something about,
he starts, but none listen; they have found out
they cannot understand; and he gives up,
all those past beginnings run through by streams
of a trilling pipe, hardly heard, leading,
the almost graspable
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