Elder Utterance
—Chamber of the Voice—
I thought a lodger harboured in my skull,
Salt on the tongue before the birth of speech,
Whose breathing silvered all the inward dark
Like groundwater ascending seams of flint.
I named it Conscience when it crossed my will,
Memory when bruisèd orchards filled my mouth
With rain no autumn carried any more.
Each name dissolved like hoarfrost under dawn;
The breath remained, more ancient than my own.
So I amassed the clamour of the world:
Brass-throated engines, incense, human praise,
The vitreous commerce of accomplished names,
Until my lungs grew dark with borrowed smoke.
When every noise had perished into ash,
One cadence still lay warm beneath my pulse.
Then rootlets supped the ferruginous night
And breathed whole orchards through the thawing loam.
The river polished darkness into light.
Above, the patient constellations kept
A grammar no astronomer had taught.
The law arrived disguised as all it ruled.
The skull I crowned a citadel proved shale,
A chalk-white reliquary for that breath
Whose rain descended ere the cloud was dreamt.
I was not made to harbour such a Voice.
The Voice remembered me before I happened.
Since then I seek no speaker in the dark.
These ribs are merely rafters for its wind.
Each breath returns more ancient than my own.
I answer what no utterance has asked.
The silence knows my name before I do.
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