BRIEF PAUSE IN THE ORGAN RECITAL

The organ stops playing and it’s dead-quiet in the church, but just for a couple of seconds.

Then a faint rumbling forces its way through from the traffic out there, the larger organ.

Yes, we’re surrounded by the traffic’s mumbling as it drifts around the cathedral walls.

Where the outer world glides by like a transparent film and with shadows struggling in pianissimo.

It’s as if, among the street sounds, I can hear one of my own pulses beating in the silence,

hear my blood circulate, the torrent hiding inside of me, that I walk around with,

and as near as my blood and as far away as a memory from four years old,

I hear the tractor-trailer driving past that’s making these six-hundred-year-old walls shake.

This place is as unlike a mother’s embrace as anything can be, yet I’m a child right now

who hears the grown-ups talking far away, voices of the winners and losers blending into one.

On the blue benches, a sparse congregation. And the pillars rise like bizarre trees:

no roots (only the communal floor) and no crown (only the communal roof).

I’m reliving a dream. Where I stand in a cemetery alone. The heather shines

as far as the eye can see. Who am I waiting for? A friend. Why isn’t he coming? He’s already here.

Slowly death turns up the light underneath, from the ground. The heath shines an even brighter mauve—

no, a color no one has seen . . . until the morning’s pale light wings in through my eyelids

and I wake to the adamant PERHAPS that carries me through the faltering world.

And every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as the blueprint of a storm.

At home the omnicient Encyclopedia stood, a yard of bookshelf. I learned to read in it.

But every person has their own encyclopedia written, which grows out from each soul,

composed from birth onward, hundreds of thousands of pages pressing into each other

and yet there’s air between them! Like trembling leaves in a forest. A book of contradictions.

What’s in there is revised by the moment, the images touch themselves up, the words flicker.

A wave washes through the entire text, followed by the next wave, and the next . . .