Jordan

For Veronica Forrest-Thomson
He keeps hearing a singular quiet voice
speaking out of the darker side of cliché
I do not have a name, I is not I
but an unborn creature and unengendered
Name this becoming by your own tongue's shaping

Language is granite, is coral, is clay
but where are eyes to see through these
as through a polished window and scan
a face bodiless and without complexion
are ears also to hear that silent speaking

In no language yet understood
sounds of no body, no gender, no person
the song of the fourth person singular
floating loose among the restless margins
out of darkness utters the unspeakable

And he takes pen to spell the secret name
He says it is body bodiless and no echo
but in the mind, the universal mind
ripple on an endless stream of stars
murmur of ever possible creations

and the pen's a wound from his fingertips
and the creature steps out of his head
no fish or fox or owl or burning tiger
but a miracle, an androgyne, an angel
full fledged and endowed with the speech

the voice, even, of his father's fathers
And the window mists over in rainbows
Softly he breathes on it, wipes off the sheen
Out there is silence, the dark world breathing
He opens it, the summer moths fly in

And other sounds invade, and all present their faces
Take me, they say. Look, we have names
Our numbers are stamped on our foreheads
We engender rainbows and demand nothing
Let us strip and dance for you naked

Now among opacities of a lined white page
Traceries of cliché well coffined within margins
speak back to the body he never left
a bad translation, that approximates
an irrelevant memento, a betrayal

And what though it were a mirage, even if
it were, or image of his own he took for other
although it never move till it dissolve
completely into memory in an eyeblink
those dead eyes smile, those frozen lips speak still

This poem was published in Learning to Talk (London, 1980) and then in Roots/Routes (Cleveland, Ohio, 1982).

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