Intimate Stranger

PRE-WORD

the older you become the more silent you are

outside in morning sun

light over one shoulder

you read in the book

a knapsack for the night

the wisdom of all uncertainties

(oh, the showdown of the word!)

through heavens the pink hot-air balloon drifts

with tongue of stalking fire

on its way to mountains

you don’t hear

and later cicadas go murmur-murmur

to stitch and hem heat’s silences with shadows

the hunter’s fire-stick barks

in the hill of the fox

and the boar and the frog and the rabbit

so rapidly death jumps up

with mute cry

of life’s anguish flared in eyes

soon to fade

you cock an ear now

the world no longer revolves round

the long dance of life with wife

with child with choir of words

with old dog patiently watching the yard

until you are ripe enough to eat –

everything wonderful

white and merciful

to lose

listen, there’s a small bird somewhere

between pewit and quail

with duskfall it shoots

two thousand meters high

into the shuttered sky

to while and hood and wink

and wing away

the night on the wind

for its legs are too weak

to sleep on earth

and sometimes it never turns back

I don’t understand it either

tonight with moon against slope of darkness

a cold stone cheek

you look into the mirror appearances

of uncertain eternities

and see the sheet

a knapsack of day

the rictus of the old word-fool

and slip away in ashes of duration

and the dog’s noise of blackness

to lip-touch the nothing-eye stillness-lie

as pre-word prayer to whiteness