driving through the mountain pass, stopping at the place where the road
cuts clean through the coal veins and leaves the remnants of trees

in the shale exposed, the imprint of things already gone, turned to a dark line,
a scribble in the stone.  How a boy in this moment lifts each one to his eye,

then to his ear, as if to hear the still small voice of the wind in the lungs of the earth.
When I awake, there is always a silence that slips through the walls at dawn,

lurks in the middle drawer of a small chest in my room where a machine
rests unmoved, its tape unheard, though it holds all that remains

of my father's voice, now the sum of mere data.
The magnet of the world endlessly inscribes and then lets go.

How the heart orbits each silence like a small moon, revolving
around what it cannot leave and what it cannot remember.