Work-torn clothes, the ache in his eyes:
how the knee that steadies paper or bowl is still
the same, slight uncertain crutch it has always seemed to him to be.
He can see only its hollow persisting, the way
his whole life is forever marked Anonymous.
Via negativa – the great, uncomprehending way.
Deer in an American night, coyote moan: is their
dark path in the cold something that also vanishes
their bare, forked animal footprints as they move away?
Do I move with them in a solidarity of erasure?
My ears, at least, are almost as fine-tuned, and
what they hear is not always pure invention. Night-miracles:
insects lost in their haze of white-noise, airplanes
lowing to impermanence in a blackest sky, a father and
a mother crying, not far, in a shadow trailer-home.
And this dream of a lady-saint peering into brambles and thickets
because she can hear her own voice in there,
telling her the way.
To hear it she loses it somewhere, first.
Goes for days and years mislaying the clues
she has already given away – diamonds of a deaf-mute
scattered in the weeds. Left for dharma-lions
and wild men to stumble on,
long past midnight.
(II.2004, CA.)
whispered lineage 
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