The Brooklyn Rail

A LOUD, LONE SOUND
                                       
                                       for Cole

Words. The words.
Open heart. Open lips.
An open river.
Her open death.

My open mouth,
or her open mouth.

The current of speech reverses course.
The river flows into the hidden place,
and by some luck I’m among the living,
and words come out of me.

She is not the first to go over.
Her words come out of me.

An open heart
in Barrytown, the apartment no more
than a passage from one door to another,
from the river road
to the garden out back
down the stairs to the garden.

Summer was gone.
(Gone is not gone.)
It was November. No more was she
moving stones to bound
a new life and a place to speak.

Times. Now, words.
Next year, the Lenten roses.
And the stones forever
or until hands—
or until the river overleaping its bounds
removes them. I mean, moves them.

II.

An open heart.
I will never die.

Her words come out of her death.
Death is a mouth also.

I will die and I will never die.
I will be speaking to you in the garden
(who is speaking?)
and what I say will seem simpler than true,
that the Torah
and every concealed terma,
every blood-won refinement of tradition
has its term in the open heart.

The scholar’s words work in the shadows
toward a healing. A wholing.
Doubt me until someone’s hands
remove your doubt,

or until my death removes your doubt.

III.

The iron ties of tracks,
the chair of rock
from which she watched the river,
and sang, go to sea, go to sea…

A lullaby
in the middle of the day,
the medicine of the inexplicable
sounding like a saxophone
               under the water.

Where does that image lead me, lead us?

Because it is us, together
in the library of what seems real,
reading the braille of events

with the commentary gone missing,
(but not gone, but not missing)
gone into the abounding clarity all around us.

The meaning of this verse is the open heart.
The open heart is the shade garden
where she and I were speaking, and I thought
it was too simple to be true.
But the simple is the Hidden Rabbi who says everything.
The meaning of the open heart is the open mouth.

IV.

I will never die, and I have died.
Even the mountains say this, and they live.

Death is a grammatical problem,
first of all for the writer
of the missing letter.
She declares, I am,
and, when it is read,
she has only been. Nothing

but time intervenes. Our letters
fly through the spaces,
sealed in the envelope of the sense
we mean to make. Such friction they feel
rubs the color off, till

the naked yarn leaps
from the allotted cloth, and the reader
who received the mail in the heat of the afternoon
stands up from what he has been reading,
from what defines him. Get away
from me, my chair. Go to sea.
My desk, go away, and whatever in me
allows the darts of ink
to make too much sense…

Intelligence,
the gathering together
of the things that come
as far as my doorstep,

words and words impossibly heavy,
and when they open
empty, and yet

there is a sound inside,
a loud sound, a thunder,
a pounding hammer at intervals
in the word.

There is a sound—death, or breath—
of every dark gift. I have been
writing. I have watched myself
writing these words. I have been
standing beside the table
with my hand on her shoulder.