So difficult to hear beyond the provisional racket
of the self, the small whisper of being, 

yet sometimes I think, falling asleep by accident
after meditating, that I can feel the deepest pulse of all those I love,

slipping into a distant kitchen for a cup of water
or tripping down the morning stairs into the noise

of a different city, so far away, in whatever hour it is
in the place where they are, and that the pale flash of an elbow 

is so tangible and so such sweetness that it falls
as lightly as a hand placed on that acupressure point 

that hurts above the heart. I don't know if it's
bodily memory falling as imperceptibly as 

the gold pollen of the juniper tree, or the dream
of the cells of my body imagining 

the world into flesh, some centerlessness 
of being, but it's as piercing as the cry of the canary, 

not  the cultivated roller that sings with closed lips
in a cavernous cage while the waiters 

in their white uniforms and hats marked "Mother's"
yell out orders and the names of customers --

the special of the day, a bowl full of trash, a cup
full of mud--until one hunches one's shoulders

and pitches into the dark, but the original
nondescript green and yellow finch, 

discovered in 1475 on the "Isle of Dogs" that sang 
only when it was alone, a song so piercing

because it had to travel across 
all the distances of its world.