I saw it—yes—just there, in the silence between breaths: a blade of grass bowed not by wind but by a single flicker of light, that tender emissary of dusk— the lightning bug, that priest of fire who blesses every meadow.
O you small bearer of green and gold, what vast wisdom coils within your tiny belly? What songs do you blink to the darkened world, what truths do you flash to the blade you hold?
I, too, have grasped the green earth in my palm— felt its tremble and thrum, watched a whole summer declare itself in the way grass leans toward starlight.
Do not speak to me of empires and theories— tell me instead how the hush after thunder is where the soul begins, how the firefly remembers the sun, and carries its pulse through the hollows of night.
Here is your scripture: dew-wet grass, the pulse of insect wings, the scent of warm loam rising at twilight— and yes, the low chant of crickets, singing hosannas in the key of soil.
I stand barefoot in this republic of clover, declaring allegiance to the unnoticed: to the tree frog’s stillness near an old stump, the clover’s soft petition beneath my heel, the breeze that forgets no leaf, the dandelion seed drifting without regret, the shimmer barely seen, the flash in the periphery, the small, bright pulse that stirs the dusk and reminds me—ah!—I am alive.
For is it not enough to say: a lightning bug chose a blade of grass, and that was revelation?
“The way up and the way down are one and the same.” —Heraclitus, Fragment 60 (Diels–Kranz); cf. Fragment 69 (Kirk & Raven)
When the mind enclosed reels, the frame gives way— No border left to mark the night from day. No cry, no anchor, only this descent Where meaning bleeds and thought is all but spent.
It is not drift, but failure to remain— The loosening of self from shape, from name. It does not seek, nor struggle, nor insist— It simply ceases, lost beyond all reach.
No wind attends, no witness marks the trace, No voice declares the vanishing of place. The silence is not peace, but what survives When all the scaffolds break, and none revives.
No hand to hold, no vow left to defend— One thought still clings—then breaks before the bend. Just falling, falling, not to sky or land, But into being none can understand.
I. Stillness Before the Descent What stirs in silence but the thought of falling? The soul leans forward at the edge of time, Where earth gives way to rhythm without measure— No firmament beneath, no axis left to climb. The wind is absent here. The light, unsure. All motion trembles on the breath of stillness. We speak of peace, yet dread the calmest shore— For we have built our gods from fear and witness.
II. The Water Below Not storm, not wave, nor tempest’s hissing swell, But quiet depth—the fathomless unknown, Uncoiling silence from a buried bell Where light has never touched the sea-worn stone. Here dwell no monsters, save the mind’s own eye. The fear is not of drowning, but of seeing— That which reflects not sky, but self, and why The soul recoils from naked being.
III. The Humbling The sea does not instruct with word or wind— It shapes the soul by salt and slow erosion. A kneeling cliff, worn smooth where waves have pinned Each boast to sand, each name to dark devotion. The deeper still you go, the less you hold— No torch remains, no doctrine, no command. The deep forgives, but never does it fold— It presses wonder into trembling hand.
IV. What Remains So is the fear a gift, once held aright— A trembling compass on the soul’s long chart. For he who feared the deep, yet dared its night, Returns not wise—but hollowed, whole of heart. He cannot speak of what he saw below, Only that silence taught him how to kneel. And those who know will know. The rest may go To read their truths upon a turning wheel.
Léon Spilliaert, Vertigo (1908) Indian ink brush wash and colored pencil on paper, 64 × 48 cm. Kunstmuseum aan Zee, Ostend, Belgium.
At the Crossing
by Donald S. Yarab
Words gather like dew on dawn’s edge, names unspoken, waiting to be born. They tremble in the mouth of silence— a stillness before the world. But say them, and they splinter— what was whole becomes approximate. Each syllable divides the light and leaves behind shadow.
Color can have no truth— for truth demands a stillness color will not grant. It shifts with light, with eye, with sorrow or with song. If it were true, which hue would reign? Whose gaze would be the measure? It is not fact, but feeling— not essence, but event.
Touch is first knowing, before word, before sight. It does not describe—it confirms. Yet it deceives: a surface hides a wound, a hand may linger, then withdraw. What truth lies in contact— in pressure, in pulse? Or is touch merely the place where self and other collide and pretend to know?
Sound resonates not in air alone, but in the hollows of the soul. One hears hymn, another wound. Its truth lies not in frequency, but in the body that receives it— in bones that tremble, in hearts that flinch. Which is the true tone— the one that soothes, or the one that sears?
Time marches allegedly, metronomic, proud— but to whom does it keep this beat? To the grieving, it halts mid-breath; to the joyful, it slips its leash and runs. Some say it flows; others drown without a ripple. Perhaps it does not move at all— perhaps we shift, casting shadows on still walls and calling them hours.
Truth cannot be summoned by sense, nor sealed in proposition. It glimmers, briefly, when doubt is honored, when contradiction is not flaw but form. Truth is not what endures, but what survives the testing— a trembling filament between worlds, not the anchor, but the thread.
Intersection is not a place but a moment— when word is heard, when color wounds, when sound divides the silence, when time dissolves into breath, and touch recalls the nearness of all things.
And there— at that trembling margin— truth does not appear. It haunts the space where meaning almost forms.
A Reflection Interwoven with Ante Verba, Verba, and Postverbum
Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Untitled 2005, acrylic on canvas, 128 x 194½ in “His madness is a circle of fire, an unbroken circuit of excess, each attempt at containment spilling into the next”—Art historian Malcolm Bull on the Bacchus paintings.
The three poems, CARMINA TRIA: DE VOCE AGGLUTIVA, which follow—Ante Verba, Verba, and Postverbum—did not emerge by design. They followed Liber Agglutivi as if by necessity. Once the treatise had been written, these poems had to be. They are not commentaries on the Liber, nor are they didactic restatements of its metaphysical claims. Rather, they are its echo—its ember. They are the hymns sung at the threshold that Liber Agglutivi only describes.
Even readers unfamiliar with the medieval-inspired treatise can enter these poems directly. They function as meditations on how language lives in us before we speak it, while we speak it, and after our words have fallen silent. Readers of the Liber will recognize these concerns, but the poems make them immediate and felt rather than theoretical.
They move through language as tremor, fire, and resonance. The sequence below mirrors the deeper structure of the Liber: from the agglutum primitivum (pre-verbal memory), to the verbum intransitivum (word as creation), to the postverbum and glosselitha (residual presence).
CARMINA TRIA: DE VOCE AGGLUTIVA
I. Ante Verba
Language as Tremor, Silence as Light
Ante Verba (Versus ad limen vocis) Verbum non dicitur, sed fit. Non transit, sed regnat. Nomen quod loquitur se ipsum non oritur ex ore, sed ex ossibus. Lingua non fert sensum, sed tremorem. Memoria quae nescit quid meminerit audit quod non sonat. Tacere est tangere lumen. Loqui est amittere formam, ut recipiatur flamma.
Before Words (Verses at the threshold of voice) The word is not spoken, but becomes. It does not pass through, but reigns. The name that speaks itself arises not from the mouth, but from the bones. Language carries not meaning, but tremor. Memory that knows not what it remembers hears what does not sound. To be silent is to touch light. To speak is to lose form, so that the flame may be received.
This poem inhabits the space where language has not yet been spoken but is already forming. It suggests that words do not begin with speech—they begin with the body, with memory, with a force older than conscious thought. In the Liber, this is called the agglutum primitivum—the murmur that speaks itself rather than being spoken.
The line “non oritur ex ore, sed ex ossibus” (“arises not from the mouth, but from the bones”) aligns with Martin Heidegger’s vision in Letter on Humanism, where language is not a tool but the “house of Being.” Maurice Blanchot, in The Writing of the Disaster, understands silence not as negation but as a paradoxical mode of presence—a vision we carry forward in our own line from Ante Verba: “Tacere est tangere lumen.”
The poem resists the tendency to think of silence as a void. It suggests instead that silence is already full—that the word is merely what breaks the threshold.
II. Verba
Language Does Not Carry Meaning—It Generates It
Verba Non instrumenta, sed ignes. Non indicia, sed invocationes. Ex spiritu fiunt formae. Ex sono fit lumen. Verbum non portat sensum; generat. Non sequitur lucem; effundit eam. Obliti sumus verba sentire— at illa nos sentiunt.
Words Not instruments, but fires. Not signs, but invocations. From spirit, forms arise. From sound, light is made. The word does not carry meaning; it generates it. It does not follow light; it pours it forth. We have forgotten how to feel words— but they feel us.
Verba shifts from anticipation to ignition. Here, the word becomes flame. It does not describe; it creates. This is the essence of the verbum intransitivum found in the Liber—a word that does not pass meaning from subject to object, but emits meaning by its very being.
This echoes Jacques Derrida’s insight in Of Grammatology: that language does not simply transmit ideas—it generates meaning anew with every utterance. Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature? treats language as an existential act, not a report, and this vision is mirrored in the line “Verbum non portat sensum; generat.”
The agglutivum, as the Liber defines it, is precisely this: a word that binds meaning not through grammar, but through presence. The poem closes with a reversal: it is not we who perceive words, but words that perceive us.
III. Postverbum
The Spectral Afterlife of Language
Postverbum Verbum abit, sed tremor manet. Non vox, sed vestigium vocis. Non lumen, sed fulgor in ruina. Post verbum non est silentium, sed memoria quae loqui recusat. Forma cecidit— resonantia viget. Non est oblivio, nec repetitio. Est remanentia sine nomine. Quod dictum est, abit. Quod vivit, remanet.
After-Word The word departs, but the tremor remains. Not voice, but the trace of voice. Not light, but gleam within ruin. After the word there is not silence, but memory that refuses to speak. Form has fallen— resonance thrives. It is not forgetting, nor repetition. It is remainder without name. What has been spoken departs. What lives remains.
What remains when the word falls away? Postverbum addresses the residue of speech, its spectral persistence. The Liber speaks of the glosselitha—words no longer active but still resonant. This poem inhabits that after-space: where meaning is not present, yet not gone.
Derrida’s trace (especially in Writing and Difference) hovers here: a remnant of presence that cannot be fully recovered, nor fully lost. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, evokes this through the fragment—the broken form more alive than the whole. And Bachelard’s “intimate immensity,” in The Poetics of Space, seems apt: the vast echo of what once was word.
This is not nostalgia. It is presence beyond sound.
Coda: Language as Tremor, Fire, Trace
The poems above are not marginal to Liber Agglutivi—they are its liturgy. They enact what the treatise evokes: a philosophy of speech where the word is not a vessel but a lifeform.
If the Liber speaks of agglutive words—words that bind not by syntax but by resonance—then these poems are agglutive acts. They offer no argument. They offer invocation.
Together, they invite us to listen differently—not just to what we say, but to what speaks through us when we are most quiet, most present, most alive to the mystery of having language at all.
Northcoast Antiquarian 