Even a Soul Submerged In Sleep is Hard at Work, And Helps Something of the World
—Heraclitus
The temple of Artemis hasn’t been stone
warmed by a sun under the ubiquitous
staccato rattle of red-fronted serin
so long not even Sinatra could sing it back.
The past isn’t a stray dog we can whistle home
or make stay by speaking the word it has
wanted us to say forever, the sound of it
so other it could be a word in some tongue
so foreign & articulate it’s not human.
There are whole vocabularies submerged
in what we think we know of the world.
So much is subliminal in our attempts
to define a single moment, alone in ruins,
haunted, not by the voice of Sinatra, broken
& singing words others have written
with enough passion the lyrics take on
his scorched voice even in memory, but
by the secular psalms of serin & shrike,
plover & chat, buntings, & the unmistakable
murmurs of a handful of ghosts who
don’t know the past is the past. For them,
Ephesus is still being built & there is music
in the streets, a faint humming everyone
out walking in what they don’t know is the past
takes up, singing what lyrics they can remember
when they remember them. The smoke makes
a stairway for you to descend, the dead rasp in
their best Sinatra. In our sleep, the dead
push one another higher & higher in swings
they finally fit again, now they have no flesh