Words

“words still melt into something beyond their embrace”
-Rilke.

Words are the immeasurable submitted to the measure – that’s the trouble with words.

When I see a branch 
Silhouetted
It's a crack in the sky;
Black lightening,
Streaking out in swimmer's strokes,
Relentless,
Pushing through the padding
Of what I cannot see ...
Hesitate
To call nothingness:
Each wasted bud,
The final masterpiece,
The kinetic life 
Of leaves…

Even in a high wind the portrait of truth hangs still:
Still as a crack in the sky,
As a vein on a temple,
As a blood-filled and stained, broken, vessel;
Or a lick of frost ...
(From the centre to an edge or an edge to the centre,
Stilled flame leaping up from the edges of a sun -
These truths are held in a newborn's iris) ...


Truth is also the shape of sound
The shape of this sound shatters and cracks in the sky.
The shape of this sound makes me appreciate the globular beauty of a splash;
The nature of liquid.
A rounded marble with the fractal flaw in it becomes the frost and the branch,
The portrait of one thing in many,
Made global by a vision.

What is this wordless and many worded thing-wrought?
Curs of a pack aiming, to surround quarry;
With yips and nips tiring by attrition, to pull it down…
What is this meat?
I look to the silent words,
Hearing with every sense;
When dew turns to frost what is it saying?
And what word is finished when it turns back?
And, then, what word is whispered when it becomes the air again?
The flesh which holds the eyes, the tongue which lets love fly,
Makes...
Meat of meaning.