Let Me Hear You
I am the disappearing point of an inverted pyramid
made from the two
before me, and the four before them
whom I know as only names
and snapshots, and farther back not even that, a
total namelessness fans out
without face or fact, no date,
no single anecdote, or artifact,
barely a hundred years away
the family slate wiped back
into a clean abyss, a cenotaph
of lives only my body remembers
in ways I can’t know about
even as I pass them
through me to my children
who through them will pass them on
to theirs, and theirs,
while I sink further back into no longer being known–
as if what even now I can’t help think of
as the stately name-emblazoned
marble manor house of self
had all along been nothing but
a hut made not from mud or
even straw but
bits of ever changing
string which
self is just the precious puppet of
no puppeteer is pulling
blown about in planetary winds
no one can feel.
Outside is inside now.
The pyramid whose point
we are is weightless
and invisible
and has become itself the night
in which alone
together
on a high plateau
we go on shouting
out whatever name
those winds keep blowing back
into the mouth that’s shouting it.
