Audio: Read by the author.

One morning when the weather was strange
and haunted following a rain—
I believe a fog had settled like
a thought over the field and the sun
that peered through it troubled the thought—
I remember saying to myself,
for no one was around, it’s like
we’re living in a Turner painting,
a haunted cave of melody
so indistinct, almost unseen.
As if a painting could convey
its time and also imagine a time
after, but keep the original time
to let it heavily hang in the present.
The point is, something in the world
is timeless, beyond the measure of time,
yet we perceive the timeless in time,
aware of its weight and of its passing
lightly like a song through a voice.
It isn’t always beautiful,
the voice, the time, the foggy scene.
I said the fog had settled like
a thought over the field, but the thought
was mine. I wasn’t sure if the scene
was beautiful. Something was ghostly,
the spirit of something not alive
was there. But maybe it was alive,
a spirit passing through the night
now lingering over the field.
The sun, as cold as a cat-eye marble,
was out of place in the scene, but there.
We love the sweeter passages
of time, but never get it right.
The sense of time floating in time,
the effort to capture time in time,
in verse, in the ancient rhythm of verse,
not in my voice, but a timeless voice
haunted by a timeless voice
before it—rhythmic, keeping time
to the world of trees and fields and fog
resounding, as if a fog resounds—
that is the effort of my art.
Such as it is. It’s a plain thing,
as plain as a field in early spring
with two or three blurry symbols,
composed almost completely of silence,
because it’s there, the oldest art,
and that’s what Turner painted, silence.