There are words and there are words:

in every language a surfeit of words— words for bread and hunger,
words for pain and cry, for rain and sleep and sunlight; words
for milk and salt, a baby’s spit, an old man’s phlegm, a night-
bird’s cry; words for the way the wind sounds, whipping
and soughing through the trees; words for cuss and cough
and kiss, words for flame and burn, blood, heat—

There are words and there are words, for sometime in the past
someone must have seen a white snakeroot glowing in the meadow,
a seed burst into flower or shrivel into dust; or heard
the tinny orchestra of tree crickets warming up at dusk,
oily bassoon of frogs in the river’s sludge-filled mouth
which must have moved him to work his lips into a shape

mimicking their sound, yet every sound he made
was always shadow— And is this why we want to throw
ourselves at the elusive, burrow into the music: press the wrists,
the fingers of the hand into the board; draw the bow’s whole length
across the string as if by quivering, it’s possible to leach
more of the quickly fading summer light we love?

~ впиватьса (vpivatsia)

For Pavel Ilyashov

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.