Furious Versions

6.

It goes on and it goes on,
the ceaseless invention, incessant
constructions and deconstructions
of shadows over black grass,
while, overhead, poplars
rock and nod,
wrestle No and Yes, contend
moon, no moon.
To think of the sea
is to hear in the sound of trees
the sound of the sea's work, 
the wave's labor to change
the shore, not for the shore's sake, nor the wave's,
certainly not for me, 
hundreds of miles from sea,
unless you count
my memory, my traverse 
of sea one way to here.
I'm like my landlocked poplars: far
from water, I'm full of the sound of water.
But sea-sound differs from the sound of trees:
it owns a rhythm, almost
a meaning, but
no human story,
and so is like
the sound of trees,
tirelessly building
as wind builds, rising
as wind rises, steadily gathering
to nothing, quiet, and 
the wind rising again.

The night grows 
miscellaneous in the sound of trees.

But I own a human story,
whose very telling
remarks loss.
The characters survive through the telling,
the teller survives
by his telling; by his voice
brinking silence does he survive.
But, no one
can tell without cease
our human 
story, and so we
lose, lose.

Yet, behind the sound
of trees is another 
sound. Sometimes, lying 
awake, or standing 
like this in the yard, I hear it. It
ties our human telling 
to its course
by momentum, and ours
is merely part
of its unbroken 
stream, the human
and otherwise simultaneously
told. The past
doesn't fall away, the past
joins the greater 
telling, and is.

At times its theme seems
murky, other times clear. Always,
death is a phrase, but just
a phrase, since nothing is ever 
lost, and lives
are fulfilled by subsequence.
Listen, you can hear it: indescribable,
neither grief nor joy, neither mine nor yours....

But I'll not widow the world.
I'll tell my human 
tale, tell it against
the current of that vaster, that
inhuman telling.
I'll measure time by losses and destructions.
Because the world
is so rich in detail, all of it so frail;
because all I love is imperfect;
because my memory's flaw
isn't in retention but organization;
because no one asked.

I'll tell once and for all
how someone lived.

Born on an island ruled by a petty soldier,
he was wrapped in bright cloth
and bound to his mother's hip,
where he rode until he could walk.
He did not utter a sound his first three years,
and his parents frowned.
Then, on the first night of their first exile,
he spoke out in complete sentences,
a Malaysian so lovely it was true song.

But when he spoke again
it was plain, artless, and twenty years later.
He wore a stranger's clothes,
he married a woman who tasted of iron and milk.
They had two sons, the namesakes
of a great emperor and a good-hearted bandit.
And always he stood erect to praise or grieve,
and knelt to live a while
at the level of his son's eyes.