print previewback STEPHEN HAVEN
Equal, Always Equal, to the Inexpressible
That’s what the stoic said believing the pond of his own head
Flush as any flush thing, lake or sea, winter’s runoff
In the drink of eternity, the rock, the pulse of utter solitude
In which the only conversation is your own, single splash
Of a rose outside a leaded window, its inexpressible attitudes,
The train strumming by, the four year old drilling the floor
Above your head till you know you’ll soon be dead,
The trees’ thin crowns, not yet winter in their stammer.
You wish to take yourself inside the bamboo wind chime
Singing of Indonesia, rising among born-again cicada
Nineteen years under, some litany of home
Clacking in wooden bones. The lost art of repose,
The flapped, worn out blind of clicked, webbed time,
Serial surrogates displacing the places you’d been,
The touch of them nothing till you web them up again,
The mind’s muscle slackening in the saved chipped page.
Out of darkness the ear will lead us. You must be very quiet
To hear blind Milton chanting to his daughter in the space
Our century vacates. So the window of a single rose.
You sit there remembering your father reading
Sunday afternoons, a glass of sherry floating in snow,
Heifitz in Beethoven’s concerto, this wooden wind,
These insects slumbering through
Long gestations of some mind, conjured in quietude. 
