In our language we have one word only
for breath, sigh, whisper, and gasp,
but six for different clicks of the tongue.
We refresh our souls by chanting
in the otherguess light before dawn
while we dress for the annual reunion.
Here we make black kites from silk
shed in spring by giant stag beetles –
their old carapaces the size of doors:
stretched on frames they become dry
drums for the wind to call our ancestors
who rise up the sound ladder against a sky
bright as a new painted guiro.
On our mountain, in our cool hall
on firework night we hear ice music:
our marimba a frozen waterfall,
ice rings out in thin fluorescent air,
a catch, a loop of lunar noise.
The instruments are melting, slippery,
and hearing the light, our shaman, scruffy
in moth-eaten fur, bells, feathers,
barks through his ice-horn: sound
waves reverberate in space, spread, curl out
to protect the far edges of this world.