Every Word Turns Away
Every word turns away
shame-faced and a liar
when you try to say things so true
they could only be contaminated
by a mouth.
And the tree in your voice
may be its own guitar
and every flower of your breath
be rooted in stars like the wind,
and you can spend a whole lifetime
trying to say everything
as if words could exact living destinies
from the names on the scrolls of the dead
to save everyone, to save
everything that exists
from nothing,
but when you're done,
when the tree falls silent
and the bird has flown away,
everything, just as it is,
will still be left unsaid
and just as there is no likeness for the living
there will be no likeness for the dead.
It is the unsayability of the mystic theme
that runs through us like a road through a dream
or the poem in our bloodstream
that is the cosmological constant
that keeps on expressing us
like waves of its own water
though we go looking for ourselves
like empty cups
to fill the topics of our names
forgetting like the moon
that water is its own chalice.
Why kneel by the water like the moon
to drink from your own face
as if it tasted any different downstream
than it did when you were a cloud
high on the mountain
when you can taste
the facelessness of the sea in everything
if you drink deep enough?
And there are eyes full of wine
waiting to get drunk on you
that haven't bloomed yet
and wells that your tears
are still falling through
like plumb-bobs and pennies
that haven't reached bottom yet,
and deaths that are antiquely your own
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poem by Patrick White
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