The Third Voice
Restless in the cradle night.
I spin and curl,
witless I puzzle over
a timeworn conundrum of self.
The brain buzzes on
being its usual endless blunt toothed saw.
The body belches and rumbles
as it tirelessly works to produce
the odd snort or snore.
All is a normal stasis on an escalator
speeding to nowhere,
Just the random outtakes
from under-rehearsed thoughts
dropping like dying mammoths
into tar pits of forgetfulness.
Then your hand, or is it mine
lays an imminence on my inner sight.
Can a hand be within a hand?
All five senses but also a sense of presence,
as if my flesh were a glove
for some beloved ghost – yet
a warm substantive entity,
more a reality than I.
No harm is here,
only the begetting of love,
a flowering,
both an opening and an enclosing.
There is a voice,
one I realize I had left somewhere
returning now to charm time,
to show me
where a loss had occurred.
There was a bifurcation,
two voices grew deaf to each other.
This recollection becomes
a mirror of awareness.
I am now translucently unilingual.
Oceanic and free.
This is how the All speaks, said one voice.
This is how the All listen, said the other.
A third voice said:
and here is the grace of silence.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2021
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