- Sound over the empty space
- the empty place
- in the center of my self.
- Sound as breath sounds
- over the hollow heart
- of a bamboo flute.
- Sound a pure, long tone:
- vibration of nothing
- moving inside of nothing.
- Songs are the sisters
- of emptiness.
- Notes are born in the spaces
- inside instruments.
- Music in my dreams
- pours from the throat of a bird
- nesting in the undented pillow beside me.
- My body wraps in sleep around empty space,
- like whispered prayers
- wrapping the sacred silence of a cloister.
- This is the song
- of steps walking hollow on unpeopled streets,
- the lyrics of conversations
- spoken to silence.
- This is the song of eating and drinking
- the empty, icy places between the stars.
- Ring like bells on the far side of mountains,
- or like a lacquered nail tapping crystal
- in a hall with a table yards long
- set for one.
- Sound the orchestral chord of a footfall
- on moss among redwoods
- in the dim first or last hours of day.
- Drum the measure of waves
- murmuring caresses to the hull’s perfect curve
- parting warm seas in a moonless night.
- Sing the arias of wind in columned canyons
- confessing to the red and yellow flesh
- of mummified oceans.
- Sound the depth of hollow, untouched places
- under seas
- within the earth
- among the stars
- inside my skin.
- Sing one pure celestial note,
- born in a cathedral volume
- of still, empty space.
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