Song





*

Where in its background the foreground 
whispers a song.


Two conversations at once.  The simultaneous 



always slows forward momentum:



the foreground leaning back, falling

through the background.




The deaf one speaks so softly that

the hearing one cannot hear.

*

Always, always caught between the two.




When a body bends double, double enough,

it sees itself.  See? And


when it bends back,  it merely curves.




As if to demonstrate: there was something here

before.  That remains.  Could see


the song repeating itself, but not hear it.




*

Slept in the disruption of—


between: there 
was sleeptalk, hardness of breath,
a message that resisted transmission.


We who sleep in this psalm are our own
intercessors.

*

Who cannot go back, there, cannot
allow the tune immemorial


to resume in the ear.  Between


the tune itself and its singing, the tiny


transit of memory goes deaf.




Got up from that bed, stiff  
with the garbled descant of the sounds.




Who sleeps parallel to time and place is her
own intermediary.  

She who haunts, translates.

*

Sound, sound swollen with itself

retreats, repeals its own body.


Two voices—more—
at once.



A thing sung falls through itself
forsaking translation.

The bed softens as the voices do.



If a thing was once before, and then

becomes after, the hearer will continue
to exist, indefinite, along its

continuum.

*

Confusion was a bed,
a couching place,  between
the fore and the

background.


Who slept there slept like all beings who sleep.