What Remains Unsayable
The dictionary animals are fast asleep,
as they have been all their lives,
as you were told when you were told
—by whom, you couldn’t say—
that you may never open that book.
(You were a child,
this was your first memory.)
You imagined
—you could not have done otherwise—
birds with their sharp faces
tucked under their wings—
there is no “why.”
You grew dizzy with the belief
that they dreamt only of you.
(If you woke them
could they steal
your wishes?)
But the book, the book,
its cover worn smooth as the sky,
the mille-feuille of its pages
would fall to flakes
at the most careful touch.
(Its title illegible,
a lost, ancient message.
Flecks of gold foil
under your tiny nails,
it might have been sand
from the moon.)
That night, inside your dream,
your ears tuned to a distant
clockwork chirp. You woke.
The song sang on,
your window open, the book
perched on its ledge.
(Wasn’t this
your wish before
you wished it?)
You tried but couldn’t echo
the note, the sound, the unknown
bird-like thing. You sat up all night.
(You were a child, nighttime,
then, the deepest mystery you knew.
You cannot prove your memory is true.)
As the darkness ticked away,
the chirping crept closer,
(your little mouth unable
to shape itself around
those uncanny sounds,
your baby bird throat open
as if waiting for a worm)
the book slipped out the window,
gilt-edge page after page.
Held still by your pillow
you froze to your bed
and watched it go—
(You could never reduce this
to human words, never dared try
to tell anyone—the cruelty
of children dumb and blunt,
of mother, without remorse,
—silence the thought.)
Years have peeled away
—the disappearance of
the book without a further word—
yet, ear cupped to your pillow,
you hear an otherworldly bird
insistent in its own metallic rhythm.
It has been so uncountably long
since night scrolled by
unsilent,
unblank.
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