Listening to the digestive processes at
five in the morning,
and to the birds singing, and to the
sound of traffic.
Are they one sound, or many?
Crows. Robins.
The flickers have been pulling up the
drying moss
from the seams in the sidewalks and
along the curbs by the street
to get at the ants.
Broken lines this morning.
Because everything is poetry?
But of course everything isn’t, the
experts will say.
Or they will say, while stroking their
imaginary beards,
Only in a sense.
This means they are wise,
and that, in all likelihood, I am not,
which is true, but not because
they say so.
With so many of us talking at once,
I wonder how there can be silence at
all.
Or is silence the sum total of
sound,
An infinite roar, a vessel rimmed
with stars?
How quiet we are in the ground.
As if one needs an entire lifetime to
learn the art,
when love is in, and out, and all
around.
