A poem by Sally Benzon
The sounds of trees
Who fail to be nowhere
If they are not heard
Humor into sounds
Of all leaps and sizes.
The voice unspoken
Ages the weathered tongue
To compose an echoing body.
Elates from the heartbeat
Into zero-minus gravity
Where impulse conveys
The stars of night to guide
The toil of a dung beetle’s trail.
Life here. Life now.
Measures of action
Seen and unseen,
Tone on tone
The gist of orbits
Tide with the pine trees
And their wingless whispers.
Contrary hearsay on the horizon
Is quickened with decay
Sweetened by moonlight.
An ending looms at shoreline.
This, then: a woman of the immortals
Whose rogue wave is conceived
To peak scale; improbably, delicate in listening
For all the lone Earth to resound
Within her, free float, the Eternal:
Again! Lasts to open pitch.
