“For there can be no bridge without the shore”

“For there can be no bridge without the shore”

And I cannot speak the shades 

  Of blackberry violet into the eyes the blind,

Nor can I transcribe the tones of birdsong into the ears of the deaf.

Tell me, can you speak

       the roar of the wind

    onto the skin of the stillborn child? or convince her that she lived in a world

where sunrises and the moon are real things

  And make her to see the silver and amber of their morning and midnight sheens?

  I like to think of myself as weaver of words,

      A forge of phonetic ore.

  But words like to be unwieldy things,

     signposts wedged

                                  in the gap

      between Thing and it signifying Shadow,

 And I find that the thick rippling scars

     Where I’ve welded them together

                Cannot always be polished out,

And that I’m gracefully constrained

  To be not a creator

    But merely a re-arranger.

     

    Words are bridges in need of a shore.

       Their burdens are keyholes

           In a bolted cedar wood door,

     And for keyholes, we have, for making more, poems for shotguns.

 But, no matter how many poetically gunpowdered keyholes

I arrange into these doors,

      I cannot seem to say what I see — do you see what I’m saying?

      Of course, I know that you do

                   but do you see what I see?

There is One who’s words rumble

     with undertones of reality,

          swallowing that abyssal gap called blindness    

resounding visceral and honey thick,  

 sounding more violet than the one on my lips and on this page.

Let us see they are our only hope.

Let them raise beaches from the bottom of the sea.

— Elijah Marshall