- from “The Discourse on Language” -
How nice it would have been to slip in here by stealth,
as into all the days on which we’ll meet.
Yet nicer still to have been enveloped in words,
borne away beyond all possible beginnings.
I would have liked to hear a nameless voice,
rushing ahead of the moment in which I spoke,
leaving me behind to enmesh myself in it,
to lodge myself, conceal myself in it,
to resume its rising and falling cadences,
to place myself in the gaps it had left behind,
as if it had paused to beckon to me.
Neither I nor that voice would have ever begun,
yet the words would issue from it as I spoke them,
while I stood in its path – a slender gap,
a point upon which it threatened to disappear.
[Previous: As They Scuff Their Shoes]
[Next: Writing Regina's Sestina]