Permeable

I have to teach myself again to love
this: the fall of sound on sound, like gravel
trailing, streaming, steaming dust from where
the climber's foot just pressed and left behind
the shape of its own absence. There's some-
thing in me forgot, that thought the words
inside, unvoiced, divorced from sound, could live--
as if a root divorced from earth could


Wait, though. That's not it. 

                             I hear
the green sprout snap, while egg-
shaped leaves float, unsuspended, free of sense
above a ground all silently ascream.

Is that just what I meant?

When stolid, solid, soil-bound, brown and dank 
with rot and my own sense of gravity--where else?
The petals yellow-golden, pink as flesh
pulsate, vibrate to send the message down
to my subterran brain. Why not? Where else?

There must be holes. There must be tunnels in
from both sides of a boundary. Any one.
Nothing gets through without a broken gate.

Not sound, not sense. Not beauty. Even rain.