How many words can I learn before dying,
words right for an articulate old age?
My brain wants to know.
My muscles want to know.
Also my bones.
Also my paper and pen.
I want to live – literally.
I was deprived of an articulate beginning.
As an infant I had no words
to name the avalanche of occurrences
that buried me in unspoken experience.
After feasting sixty years on the dictionary
I am now prepared to register last events.
With words hot at my fingertips I can
thaw incidents otherwise frozen in silence.
I want to live alert in this old house
weathered beyond reasonable repair;
broken windows, sagging doors,
grass up through the floorboards.
I want to write at my wounded desk.
The words I need to know,
I know –
words
to catch on the fly;
the velvet voice of twilight,
the pink voice of sunset,
the dark voice of midnight,
the whisper of withdrawing dark at dawn.