“Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who have never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words”
Addie Bundren, As I Lay Dying,
William Faulkner
1: A Space to Fill a Lack
More to be,
what I repeat
is not what
I am.
What I think
I become
is not what I
come to have been . . .
Not to be is not
to be––
whenever I am,
I am not . . .
What I become . . .
words alone are nearly
a lone.
What we say
we have said,
all saying,
repeating,
I know nothing given
but what is received.
2: Getting Ready to Stay Dead
Leaves in the fall fall–
another kind of tautology–
not exactly how mops mop . . .
Truth beseeches; lies do not.
Lying is action;
Truth is being.
I imagine myself another man;
I imagine you the same woman.
It does not work out.
I feel guiltier and guiltier
in the thickening silence––
I see me the same
With sounds
I have come to be familiar––
I wish I could say
What I know I mean,
the terror in speech––
I imagine you another––
Other than who
you have been . . .
I wish I could say
What should be said
without words,
or so we think
We can imagine
a better world
in silence . . .
Who or what you could come
to be––
what is it I say
About how we are?
In the next wake,
I hold you up.
I stand behind you.
A piece of colored glass,
wave-worn smooth,
Cracked shells are tiny,
all of them spread
in a wide array
On the rough sand
of the surf
beneath my feet.
I skip another stone.
You are,
I say;
Therefore,
I am
[. . .].
3: Another Dark Voicelessness
Wet sands.
Your feet disappearing
in the soft of the sands
below the tumult
of the surf.
I sink
as I try to stand
up-right.
I watch you
watching them,
the waves.
I see you totter.
You do not stumble as I do
Thinking I want to reach out to you.
Giving is what I receive,
I think I am able
to imagine today,
Another desire
for which I have lost the word
before having found it.
The Falling Leaf Review 