Found In Translation

Sometimes I travel so deep
within winter’s quiet counsel
that I lose my language.
My mind detaches and lifts
and I float through days
and weeks, perhaps
the month of February,
sensing rhythms beyond
and traveling a path towards
the secret place of winter wisdom
not yet enfleshed by words.

When spring arrives
I begin to float closer
to the ground, and walk
into the world with clearing
perception, gradual, mute,
till I meet (I always do)
a certain April morning
and sense the movement
of stones rolled away. An opening.
Still reaching for language
(my eloquent summer speech a distant
possibility), I know I’m about to be born
into words again.

It happens like this:
I’m walking down the trail at dawn
and everything changes in a moment–
the haze of winter dissipates; winter’s
chrysalis shatters, sunlight flashes, strobing
through branches, signaling epiphanies,
colors inbreak, sounds pulse: birdsong,
peepers, buzzes and hums; the early breeze
teases forth perfumes of lilacs,
cherry blossoms, the soil’s geosmin,
that seize and ride my inbreath,
shaking loose the memory of language
amidst eruptions of buds and blooms,
and suddenly
the scarlet streak of cardinals, followed
by a rise of bluest jays, and brilliant planets
of dandelions spangling at my feet;
I stop, paused in the roaring river of spring
to balance, to breathe,
to exit my dreams and merge with
all this life.

Questions chirp through
my waking mind.
“And that?” I ask, “What is that?”
“That is green.”
“And that?”
“That is light.”
“And that?”
“That is the song of a bird,
of life, coming back to itself again.”

I listen to the music of spring; it calls:
“Here-now, here-now, here-now.”

I find my words.
And out to the garden I go,
with newborn sounds, the language
of butterflies, to speak of my winter journey,
among the robins and daffodils.

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