Beginnings stretch outward.
A trembling breath lingers.
Silence gestates
before the word is spoken.
The air holds still,
struck through with sensation,
as the unseen gathers
toward its trembling.
What do I see?
A shadow
escorted like a cenotaph,
a face dissolved
through clouds of doctrine.
What do I hear?
The long decay
of a voice grown old,
a quarrel flowering again
in the rooms of forgetting;
names abandoned,
a litany of the missing,
whose silence now
cuts more savagely
than their speech ever did.
What do I know?
I carry
the weight of not-knowing,
and raise from absence
its austere house.
Less than I imagine,
less than I understand.
Yet more
than I dare remember,
I hold.
Northcoast Antiquarian 