You Must Speak if Echo is Who You Love
I’m just one of many suitors, maybe
the least, maybe the one who speaks
the smallest words—“yes” and “no”—
as if each were a knob in the air
that turned returns us home.
It’s hard to knock on the door
when the house is made of air—
hard to see her face behind these centuries
of falling ice. I thought it
as I wandered through the fireweed’s plumes,
not exactly her silence, but the mimic
fly whose stingless, bee-like, diligence
flowers this whole field, I thought it
in these words, “yes” or “no.” A line divides
the green-rock from the limestone
so far above my head, and those who know
how to see inside the mountain-side
suffer visions that lead them within to dig
out chambers light must light
to see within stone what metal gleams—
but what I hear is the singing:
gnat’s mantic drone that mazes the heart,
and water falling through itself—
it sounds like weeping but it is not—
the veil as it pulls itself (I want
to say eternally) apart. It’s not much to say.
Those others carry stones, they carry
copper, they carry wire wound on giant spools
whose whole length will crowd with voices,
spark, and the generator’s bee-like hum
that lights the filament’s pollen
when in the night a sleepless wife pushes
down a button to shatter the senseless
dark and read her book about men who live
in tunnels writing letters
to send home. What I carried, I put down—
maybe years ago. I think it was
a chair I carried, a chair that had a pulse,
a chair that was a kind of heart—
strange I know to say—a chair like a mind
or a heart—I put it down
but still feel its weight in my arms. Yes,
it’s missing, what I thought and felt.
No, I do not miss it. Like the stingless bee,
all my work is mimicry.
Anything that keeps still can be a mirror.
This is why the heart’s no good
for reflection, but a stone will do,
pebbles, even dust, even dust blown
by the wind up into the air for one moment
will serve, will suffice, for a self-
portrait. Who doesn’t arrive bearing
these meager gifts? Breath
to break the surface sheen of the glacial lake,
Echo’s patient, melting veil—
but before that breath, before any one word,
is it an error to bend over the edge
and ask the eyes I see if they are my own?—
Don’t blink.
The would-be bride picks apart a mountain
while she waits. Just to hear a stone
echo off a stone. Bend down
and ask. Yes or no.
Dan Beachy-Quick’s most recent books are Circle’s Apprentice (poetry, Tupelo) and Wonderful Investigations (prose, Milkweed). He lives in Fort Collins with his wife and two daughters—and their dog, Carlo.
(The photo is a symbolic portrait, Duchamp’s WITH HIDDEN NOISE.)