Eine Klage-Welt

Broken

1.
They feared court orders and contracts, brow and shoulders bowed over letters from the bank, looking phrase and clause like a handful of lentils, tiny opaque lenses. Their lips trembled before the power of obscure pronouncements. Keys rusted in the locks. The fields, no longer versed in corn, flowed with loosestrife and pigweed. Crows scavenged, psalming hard, their eyes tiny opaque lenses.

2.
But who owns words?
Who spoiled
those little puffs of sense,
leaving teeth-marks?

....whereas silence—

the space where a dove rejects consolation,
where hail wakes the dead leaves of an ash
on a morning when as-for-dream
wanders sleep
toward the unbroken world—

Can silence be mine?

Could I hide silence between my palms,
carefully, like the thrush’s eggshell,
emptied and weightless,
my son discovered yesterday
in shadowy underbrush?

Now, in this other dream,
he comes to show me that shell,
made whole, hidden all night on his tongue.

It is morning, and he opens his mouth.