SPEAKING WITH THE DEAD

Speaking with the dead,
I try to hear them
instead of my perpetual monologue.

 

What have you learned?
I ask.
And they reply:
That we are leaves in a storm,
salt dissolved in the sea,
that a year reduces us
to our irreducible elements
which are speechless in the old way
but full of the sound
an earthworm makes, burrowing,
or a bird falling out of the sky.

 

No—don’t mourn for us in this new form
which admits no mourning.
Mourn for yourselves
and your unlived lives,
still full of questions.

 

. . .

 

Language, while you possess it,
can heal you.
Take this salve, this balm,
this unguent
with our blessings of silence.