Moreover when the orchestra’s concerto
across the pond bounced off the mountain dome
& traveled to me across water
I knew that time & distance had changed the sound
the way music changes inside a prison chamber
which is why I’ve learned to listen
to the reverb pressing itself
into the spaces between where the body remains
but the spirit has forsaken
where the partridge sleeps in a mound of wet feathers
where the snake not at all evil stretches
in primal movements
across the damp sand
where the hornet struggles against a web
its green shell already partly eaten
where every word I whisper every begotten sentence
is a tombstone in a cemetery of teeth
where all night outside my window
I listen to the highway run like a river
that my cousin drives through back & forth
his hair growing thick past his ears then clipped
his life not lateral but horizontal
where the sound of his life
not passing by in years
is the same as the hornet struggling
against the web the same as
the spider’s smallest mandibles
chewing through its head
because even a cell dividing in two is a sound
even thieves pillaging Cairo is a sound
even my cousin storing honey
on the sill of his bay windows
igniting the room into gold is a sound
that still exists somewhere in some echo
some mountain crater where he is moving away
into discordance where between us each year
this pond will freeze & thaw freeze & thaw
change forms change states
the salmon born down
under the vaulted ice the sunlight coming through
in arcs lit wicks cracks & fissures
which might look to the fish to be tunnels
to heaven if only fish were not
so dumb if only captivity were not the opposite
of heaven if only time were malleable if only
we could hold our breath for as long
as those loons that slip under our boat
in summer & resurface a mile away
into a place they did not choose
from Broken SpectreFind more by Jacques J. Rancourt at the library
Copyright © 2021 Jacques J. Rancourt
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.