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The sun does arise, And make happy the skies. The merry bells ring To welcome the Spring. The sky-lark and thrush, The birds of the bush, Sing louder around, To the bells’ cheerful sound. While our sports shall be seen On the Ecchoing Green. Old John, with white hair Does laugh away care, Sitting under the oak, Among the old folk, They laugh at our play, And soon they all say. ‘Such, such were the joys. When we all girls & boys, In our youth-time were seen, On the Ecchoing Green.’ Till the little ones weary No more can be merry The sun does descend, And our sports have an end: Round the laps of their mothers, Many sisters and brothers, Like birds in their nest, Are ready for rest; And sport no more seen, On the darkening Green.

A lone voice in the right empty space makes its own best company.

Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream; Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright As sunlight on a stream; Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years. Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet; Where thirsting longing eyes Watch the slow door That opening, letting in, lets out no more. Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live My very life again tho’ cold in death: Come back to me in dreams, that I may give Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: Speak low, lean low, As long ago, my love, how long ago.

It would not sound so deep Were it a Firmamental Product— Airs no Oceans keep— —Emily Dickinson Afloat between your lens and your gaze, the last consideration to go across my gray matter and its salubrious deliquescence is whether or not I’ll swim, whether I’ll be able to breathe, whether I’ll live like before. I’m caught in the bubble of your breath. It locks me in. Drives me mad. Confined to speak alone, I talk and listen, ask questions and answer myself. I hum, I think I sing, I breathe in, breathe in and don’t explode. I’m no one. Behind the wall of hydrogen and oxygen, very clear, almost illuminated, you allow me to think that the Root of the Wind is Water and the atmosphere smells of salt and microbes and intimacy. And in that instant comes the low echo of a beyond beyond, a language archaic and soaked in syllables and accents suited for re-de-trans-forming, giving light, giving birth to melanin hidden within another skin: the hollow echo of the voice which speaks alone.

Echo that loved hid within a wood Would to herself rehearse her weary woe: O, she cried, and all the rest unsaid Identical came back in sorry echo. Echo for the fix that she was in Invisible, distraught by mocking passion, Passionate, ignored, as good as dumb, Employed that O unchanged in repetition. Shun love if you suspect that he shuns you, Use with him no reproaches whatsoever. Ever you knew, supposing him to know No melody from which you might recover- Cover your ears, dear Echo, do not hear. Here is no supplication but your own, Only your sighs return upon the air Ere their music from the mouth be gone.

1 My ear amps whistle like they are singing to Echo, goddess of noise, the raveled knot of tongues, of blaring birds, consonant crumbs of dull doorbells, sounds swamped in my misty hearing aid tubes. Gaudí believed in holy sound and built a cathedral to contain it, pulling hearing men from their knees as though atheism is a kind of deafness. Who would turn down God? Even though I have not heard the golden decibels of angels, I have been living in a noiseless palace where the doorbell is pulsating light and I am able to answer. 2 What? a word that keeps looking in mirrors like it is in love with its own volume. What? I am a one-word question, a one-man patience test. What? What language would we speak without ears? What? Is paradise a world where I hear everything? What? How will my brain know what to hold if it has too many arms? 3 The day I clear out my dead father’s flat, I throw away boxes of molding LPs, Garvey, Malcolm X, Mandela, speeches on vinyl. I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf, smudged green label Raymond Speaking. I play the tape in his vintage cassette player and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name Antrob and dad’s laughter crackling in the background not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus” and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids. Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness — Antrob Antrob Antrob 4 And no one knew what I was missing until a doctor gave me a handful of Legos and said to put a brick on the table every time I heard a sound. After the test I still held enough bricks in my hand to build a house and call it my sanctuary, call it the reason I sat in saintly silence during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached the good news, I only heard as Babylon’s babbling echoes. 5 And if you don’t catch nothing then something wrong with your ears — they been tuned to de wrong frequency — Kei Miller

Dancing Queen, 2012

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a postwar Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart, the world at last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop—in 1945 — in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany— oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

How I loved those spiky suns, rooted stubborn as childhood in the grass, tough as the farmer’s big-headed children—the mats of yellow hair, the bowl-cut fringe. How sturdy they were and how slowly they turned themselves into galaxies, domes of ghost stars barely visible by day, pale cerebrums clinging to life on tough green stems.   Like you. Like you, in the end.   If you were here, I’d pluck this trembling globe to show how beautiful a thing can be a breath will tear away.

After the cling of roots and then the “pock” when they gave way the recoil up the hand was a small shock of emptiness beginning to expand. Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green and spiked. Like blissed-out childhood play turned mean they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway. It happens still. That desolating falling shudder inside and then our neighborhood seems only sprawling loops...like the patterns eaten on driftwood: even the home where I grew up (its smell of lingering wood-smoke and bacon grease) seems just a shell of lathe and paper. But this strange release follows: this tinge like silver and I feel the pull of dirt again, sense mist uncurling to reveal no architecture hidden behind the world except the stories that we make unfolding: as if our sole real power were the power of children holding this flower that is a weed that is a flower.