The word is barely out of her mouth
and the evening is full of the songs of them,
the air electric with the possibility of flight.
“Cars,” she says, and Dopplered breezes
of humanity blue shift-red shift on Douglas
Avenue, small bits of a universe with places to go.
“Life,” her palms upturned in praise of time and space,
and the tinnitus of years, the cacophony of what I’ve always thought of
as language, is suddenly gone, and I understand
that this is the way the world talks: not just two people
on a sidewalk conversing about conversing, but
the winking out of lights in a bookstore,
the texture of an orange sun sinking into a violet cloud,
the smell of the promise of rain,
the sound of night on its way, and the rending of it,
the taste of the eternal on the lips of a moment:
realize with the clarity of Lazarus rising
the difference between not moving and standing still.
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