Tongue dammed
in a dark and silent place,
I speak voids in vacuum
languages discovered
between mildewed cellar walls
under feast halls on the deep
Fall-clouded noons
of my nervous youth.
Dust-quiet, I contend
with wide margins arrayed against
this volume bustle of spoken pain.
Peace, so
bitterly achieved,
burns in fast-held solitude. And
then is spent! Burst forth, my
timid thoughts! Margined as you are--
overwhelm the sour feast
with some new thing, some
silence splintered, tongue
released! And,
later, when Fall's curtain-clouds return,
reclaim the precious cellar-peace, so
lost. Such things will ever wait
and grow again.
December 2013
