In Absence of Analog

Then in cut-diamond silence

audible only to the mind’s pure ear

I enter an other world, stepping

up the fixed meanings of words like stairs

that lead through rising palaces: indestructible,

shimmering like a force field

on a lawn of green-gold shifting clouds.

Such silence is like joy or pain,

beating the dual ear to cacophony—thinnest starsong

piercing an earth gone mad with noise.

But we are made to move here too

among the stars’ pointed silences:

the nameless grief, the unconditionable joy

cannot be felt in fixed words,

nor this material flesh make any metaphor fit

for experience outside the five acknowledged senses.

Ambivalent, our irredeemable privacy protects us.

Thus if by night I bridle the gallant sea-stallion

and ride wild over the whirlpools of flung spume

and exhilarant midnight mountains forever falling

under the fixed world or crashing up unfixed air,

my referent is my own unwitnessed incident

that need not trouble a stony ear.

Or should I turn invisible and walk free

up lanes if light webbing

the intricately laced stars,

creative of the race, perilous to the foot,

a stony eye may freely disbelieve my smile

hung before a vacancy of tongue.

No climber on the seven stairs curses

the raucous earth, nor desires

its chiseled safety, nor proffers

his report to precut words.

Therefore I mythologize to shifting clouds

that lawn sun-bright palaces with inner walls

as insubstantial as midnight air,

imaging our ambiguous world—

man’s man-made tower of such vast pretension.

I hold it lightly, a painted balloon lighter than breath,

release the string, watch it float free

into diamond silence.

Such freedom is our reality.