19

Trafficking in Words

It is not an emptiness of word that drives us

into images (images that the mind can grasp

like a parent’s hand at some perilous crossroad of verities)

but the luminous emergence of—not things—but patterns

so arcane, yet so close

that the unsecret heartbeat harbors them

as a cell harbors the chromosomes

that made it, ordering empty matter to manifest

some visible particularity of place and time.

Examining the blueprint of my own blood and brain, I sketch

not it, but the indeterminate hand

that sketched them into being,

knotting the formative lines into untried helices

that imply,

testing can the taut flesh hold

against each twist and turn of plane,

each inertia of hollow motion—

trafficking in words.

Never do we listen to mere words.

It is the shaping wind we hear, rising, thrusting, probing

the spiral tree that flowers then

within the skull.