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One thing you know when you say it: all over the earth people are saying it with you; a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital. What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin: at a street light, a man in a wool cap, yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window; he says,Please. By the time you hear what he’s saying, the light changes, the cab pulls away, and you don’t go back, though you know someone just prayed to you the way you pray. Please: a word so short it could get lost in the air as it floats up to God like the feather it is, knocking and knocking, and finally falling back to earth as rain, as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch, collecting in drains, leaching into the ground, and you walk in that weather every day.

The word comes along out of the mountain every once in awhile to chill me. Undercurrent of an unwillingness to believe all is well in early spring beside a molten river riven by sun, its loud hush and glug through leafless aspens split by a gravel bar’s pulled switch. A bull trout with fluorescent red dorsal fin eddies in a pool between a sloughed-off root clump and caved-in grassy bank. Last year’s downed trees, slash piles, busted garden gate. Heed me and hear my loneliness. Split by a desire to be known by a crowd of solitaires and by one word split. A raven falls out of the yellow flame of a willow. Its wings purely black buff sunlight. It paces the gravel bar, lifts into westerly sun. Wing flash. Black luster. Gone. It is hope that tricks. Belief that when this now shines, this now shines with or without us. Then why scribble the veery’s mid-morning marshal song? Soon Rick will arrive to help burn wood piles: gasoline newspaper cedar shakes to start the blaze in this emptiness searching for godwords. The ones God hears when priests without shoes without socks with their shawls stretched over their heads arms out make forts of light. Their backs to the congregation, their faces toward the ark, they rock. Their white wings so pure that this now is no more than then with its barbells of silence, with its task of burning.

The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased eyes curled outside themes to search the paper now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word entered its continent eager to find another as capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would house them both, they being then two might glide into this house and presently create a rather larger mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious as a newly laid table where related objects might gather to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints, the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might choose and savor before swallowing so much was the sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent percipient as elder branches in the night where words gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.

We are spendthrifts with words, We squander them, Toss them like pennies in the air– Arrogant words, Angry words, Cruel words, Comradely words, Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear. But the slowly wrought words of love and the thunderous words of heartbreak– Those we hoard.

words are birds that arrive with books and spring they love clouds the wind and trees some words are messengers that come from far away from distant lands for them there are no borders only stars moon and sun some words are familiar like canaries others are exotic like the quetzal bird some can stand the cold others migrate with the sun to the south some words die caged— they're difficult to translate and others build nests have chicks warm them feed them teach them how to fly and one day they go away in flocks the letters on this page are the prints they leave by the sea

1 As so-called quarks, so atoms before and through And after molecules, which too Constitute us awhile, pluming Through our slowly changing shapes Like beachscapes Through a duneless sandglass, say (I said, once) — all these So utterly forgetful, wiped clean As numbers with each new use, lint-free. How not so words, which pass our minds And mouths and ears from hind- Most elsewhere, on their way to elsewhere — why So? Words are the sum of their histories: rose And roke and no and blanketing snow. 2 So much less LEGO-like, click- Click together than like slick Tentacular Colonial hydrozoans tossed Together in the copper pots Of   predication — all cross- Shock and shimmery tangle — How can Anyone calculate semantic Sets so dervishly complex? How can we not expect not less but hellish Much more than to mean what we say? Then guess: How can we better but Hope to become in sum what We say when we say again love?

The sinew of the hickory that grips The axe, the rasp of salt against the skin, Or rockbound earth that shines the steel plough In spring, are thought along our coast to lend A native character, though none can match The force of grief: compare the fisherman’s Scored cheeks; the ligaments that rope the necks Of lumberjacks; or the farmer’s gnarled wrist— Compare these with the widow’s fisted look, Then judge who has the most to bear. Think of The ghost that each night slips between her sheets Or of the sudden joy of being alone Which troubles her for weeks. And you, who thought Him mean, or too devoted to his drink, Consider how the common fingerstones, Bathed in the tidal slabs, grow luminous.

The King Cobra slides through our jungles, and tucked in bushes by the riverbanks the grand Kabaragoya holds court among lizards— but if you want to swim at Mount Lavinia, or fly kites on Galle Face Green, or ride horse carts in the Jaffna peninsula of your ancestors, or bear a child in Colombo General Hospital, or sleep in Cinnamon Gardens under a mango tree, or beg in the Borella Market, or ride for historical reasons on patrol boats in the Bay, or stilt-fish off Matara down South, just remember here everywhere there is only man burning and woman burning here everywhere in shallow graves in deep graves floating out of salt water washing down the sands the dead have tongues the dead have ears tongues are speaking to ears What are they saying? What are they saying? Tell us, brown bear bolting out of your cave. Tell us, leopard leaning on your branch. Tell us, flamingos. Bend your necks and pour wine pour wine Hoopoes, kingfishers, cranes, have you got your messages on the bill, are you ready to sing? Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Monsoon.

We would go down to the fish market early to cleanse our vision: the fish were silver, and scarlet, and green, and the color of sea. The fish were lovelier than even the sea with its silvery scales. We thought of return. Lovely too the women with jars on their heads, olive-brown clay, shaped softly like thighs: we each thought of our women, their voices, their laughs, the way they walked down the street. And each of us laughed. And it rained on the sea. In vineyards that cling to cracks in the earth, water softens the leaves and the grape-stems. The sky is colored by occasional clouds that redden with pleasure and sun. On earth, flavors and smells; in the sky, color. And we were alone there. We thought of return the way a man thinks of morning after an utterly sleepless night. We took pleasure in the color of fish and the glisten of fruit, all so alive in the musk of the sea. We were drunk on the thought of impending return.

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