–For Paul Celan
You lean forward, hands clasped, lips pursed,
as if about to say, Na ja, where have you been?
I have been waiting a long time for you, here,
where something or someone always intervenes.
Today it’s you—a respite from this necessary estrangement.
Something is close by, in the dream of a second language
at your bedroom window, an endangered species
that was sung to you, before it was spoken,
as if birdsong preceded the language of men;
that if you could somehow render,
it would call you to the long table of yesterday,
the now unbroken vessels.
It would lull and gesture over the table.
The slight of hand of a language can clean its own sequestered words,
Auto de fe and legerdemain as in light of the hand.
Here, we negotiate our reciprocal futures.
We make no demands, exact nothing,
not the easy pleasures but the coming things–
the unfinished listening that I love without distraction.
the chalk star above my door just means it’s a safe house
where you can refresh yourself until things blow over,
or a place to leave your contraband and bequests,
whatever’s too difficult or archaic to carry around,
roses bedight and perishables for safekeeping,
adorned or encumbered in the fineries of concealment–
balm and ballast in our unspokeness,
and the unanswered questions of like bodies.
I know you trust me,
but you don’t trust star-shaped things the way I do,
You think of zig zag shadows, burning wheels,
bent stars on empty sleeves and lapels,
or whoever hung them by their pointed wings in the forest.
We lift our heads at the same moment on distant pillows,
and remember whatever haunts its own tongue.
Although you are gone, here we are—auto de fe
as in act of trust,
still in the arms of each other’s future,
in the dream of a second language at your bedroom window
that we trust in our different ways.