Speaking to Each Other in Strange Tongues    

                                                                “when we listen to our pulse,

                                                                  that’s the sound of the Lover’s Voice”

                                                                                                          Lawrence Kushner

Unconscious in the garden, and before the apple

awakened in our mouth, did we hear the Lover’s Voice

singing beneath the skin of our wrist?

The hinge of a gate cries out in the nothingness holding

the imprint of our bodies, those hollows

we come across in a field where animals settle in the night.

Perhaps if we stop saying,

 leave us alone, we’ve got other lovers on the blue roads,  

we’d remember that what comes and goes in our breath

is the sound of someone rehearsing their name

while the cell phone, the palm pilot, keeps ringing

and spring after spring brings the separation of lambs from their mothers.

At the great delta, where reeds sway in the salted syllables

of the end, we’ll cease speaking to each other in strange tongues?

we’ll hear each other singing in the dark?