the words we have lost

'There are days when
time’s lead feet do damage,
when the sea resembles
the tear of a melancholic god,
the desert a scab
on the ribs of the land,
& the sun a shower of coals.
Days when hope
crosses her arms.

But there are days
when time is just a grin
that flies away,
days when I crave
to mix the rainbow’s every color
on a pallet,
fashion a brush from a feathered cloud
to paint a world without an axis but with several poles
& throw dice with the cardinal corners.'

~~~

There are words we will never hear, as immobile as stones, rooted to one place for all their lives. There are others that are destined to cross the seas, be translated, lovingly recorded, contested, shortened, elaborated upon, analyzed.  Further, books will be written in support of (or against) them; chairs will be set up, careers made or broken on the splinter of a sentence. Eyes will be ruined, the glass will become  more opaque, its density and curvature warping to a unique calibration, the dust will inch its way into the cracks and our hair become thinner, greyer and still the secret of those words will carry on. Some words will enter the world stage, but others will become obsolete like an old love in one's heart, reduced to the memory of a moment of infatuation on a Monday morning.

The poet, like the nomad, lives in time. Most likely neither his words nor his heart will become a legend, or part of the folklore repeated by children and the old ones.  

By chance,  a fragment of what I say makes it to her before she closes the window. I slip into the cold country of her heart, my temporary visa nearly expired, my migratory impulses dashed, to underscore the point.

~~~

What existed in the inland for all those centuries? The dry heart, the set routines, unchanging like the waves that lap the shore. The millions of waves every year, each the same and yet different,  and the tens of millions of years that pass before someone speaks a single word. 

How did they navigate the seas in the old days, before technology had extended its hand? Through songs and the stars,  the placement of each word as fixed as the star, the story remembered off by heart, the mystical union of what passes on earth with that which remains imperishable.

Pearls are substituted by oil and words by the flash of a light across a screen. Interest peaked and waned, the sap in the trees settles, the heart regains its constancy. Our lives, a brief moment in the open, a boat that forgot to count the waves but remembered the words we have lost.