Our Eternal Sounds
By Adam Clay
What might all songs lean into?
You scramble eggs one moment,
and in the next minute
you're eating them
with dry toast and black coffee
in silence.
On a day like any day,
your voice is not your own:
the grass clippings disrupt
a robin too large to fly
from worm to worm.
We don't know why we speak,
but yet our voices
persist, even when void of substance—
like a dream you'd like
to recall throughout the day,
but you don't or you can't
and after a week, it's gone forever.
Of course our voices
evolve years before our bodies—
our vocal cords vibrate like a heartbeat,
senselessly. No explanation
needed.
Eventually all languages converge.
Each thought falls
into all others. And what thought
resists being built by words?
Perhaps fear placed us
here in this room together:
a fear of fire at one point turned
into a fear of God. After that, a fear
of godlessness, a room
where a word before
another word and another
word after the first
was all we had, all we could
imagine. Somehow
an image means
more than the object itself
but not because
it's made of words. Most likely
it's because the act of creation
sets the mind down like a bird
in a field
where the speed of the invasive cannot exist.
Copyright Credit: Adam Clay, "Our Eternal Sounds" from Stranger. Copyright © 2016 by Adam Clay. Reprinted by permission of Milkweed Editions.