Wings

When the time comes
for me to ripple off this stage
(tremors
in my hands, eyes fluttering,
my body a mound of organs and tissues
taking their leave
according to their own music),
I fear that all I will recall
is the way the world has sounded
inside me.

I was never a visual man. My eyes
did their job but the sight of things
mattered less to me than their voices.
The stones whistled softly at dawn.
The ocean beat the shore, the trees
howled just below the human ear’s reach
every time the wind called them out
for daring to stand against it.

When I heard these things, they did not sound
the way they were intended to be heard,
I am sure: everything had a song, all the songs
were hymns, God was the subject of every song
and all praise of God was in all songs. Nothing
sang of devil or evil, the lace threads of each tune
were woven into patterns that made the word “beautiful”
a sad attempt at explanation, barely able to hold
a clip of each measure long enough for me
to understand what I was hearing. I only knew

that somewhere under the tide of sound
there was a rush of steel wings. I heard them
in my sleep and when I rose it continued
until every voice, every word from another human,
contained the undertone of the Hymns of the World
and it was a struggle to hear the meaning of the people
who spoke.

When you and I sat at table, or in planes and automobiles,
and I seemed distracted to you, it was because I was
hearing that sweep and thrum that had rolled over any chance I had
of listening to you. Forgive me, I was unhappy
that it became so hard to hear you, and it seemed to me
that nothing had prepared me for the pain of knowing
that human understanding was lost to me as long as I
could only hear the other voices of the world.

You would think it would be easy to hear
those same cathedral echoes in your voices, but
it was all failed song to me: I was so enslaved
to what I could hear in the floors below me
that what walked upon them was mute to me.

So when I roll off my bed at the end of my life,
when I shake myself into the last moments, be kind
to me. Lift my head to let me hear something
as lovely as all I’ve heard before, but something
I never understood: come close and whisper in my ear,
so close that nothing else can pass between us
and deafen me to you:

come close enough for me to hear
the hiss of feathers in your voice.
That way, when I am at last still,
it will be all I have to take with me.