Exile

Pinned to the wall, the sign Nightingale

the sign Goldfinch, names of percussion, of a cry

or Starling, transient of the forests,

a brilliance of images in an instant of words:

light in simulacrum, sound of the word made word. We have uttered the yellow afternoon

or the winter hood, the lead basin

of the river filing the ice of the sky,

disaffection of the word and the visible world:

we speak words, but we don’t speak the world. Impure, evening cries to us

with a weathervane of light in a sky strangled by reds,

venery of signs and falconry of words.

We live not from signs alone, but from signs’ sounds;

not from the life of the word, but from the skin of sound.

The veneer of the world in the shadowland of words.