Even the Invisible Air 
There is nothing on earth that does not have a tone. 
Even the invisible air sings when struck with a staff.   
                                                           -Martin Luther 

-1-

I walked in the dusk walled from the world 
of crowds and commerce by the star-studded sky, 
insulated from the chaos and cacophony 
of day by the dim and familiar fires overhead.
 
I lay down and perceived, grass-held, glad. 
For what happened next, I have no name: 
the sky compressed, hard as flint. Forest
separated into trees, each mythically large, 

and the streams of wind became rivers 
overflowing their boundaries, filling 
the deltas of my cells with buoyancy,
my face flushed, and tongue employed.
 
I rose enabled to assuage another's sorrow, 
enabled to aid the caged souls and the battered 
though I lack the capacity of feathers and flight 
to convey those victims of our mortal misfortune

to the curved nest of heaven on earth, 
I rose puffed up and puffing 
from no other clay than that from which I'd been made, 
man of mud, dumb and ephemeral. 

-2- 

During the bang that began the universe 
light waves crackled and hummed 
the atomic theorists say, but as I walked 
holding a stone surrounded by apple blossoms 

and the moans of cows from milking, 
what need I know of the beginning cell 
of all being, what need I know of spheres 
producing tones in celestial ways and times
 
or the mystic practice of the particle, 
the new scientific high priest tapped
into the power lines of the cosmic? 
I broke and repaired as I lay on the grass 

like the sky split by a staff of lightning rejoined, 
then heard the building thunder of joy 
rattle through thin panes of flesh, 
and knew more near than reverie and unguarded dream, 

more near than solace, joy, weeping and laughter, 
than love, in all its pre-conceptual splendor, 
in timbres of mass, of energy,
even the invisible air can sing.