The Sound of the Wild

I hear that voice which belongs to no one except the hidden world

Photo: © David Whyte

The Sound of the Wild

Finally,
at the first firm
shadow
of evening
and
after many hours
falling toward
the body’s
ebb and flow
of quiet revelation,

I hear that
voice
which belongs
to no one
except
the hidden
world
from which it flows
like a river,
filling the deep branches
of my body
with the wish to
slip beneath its quiet water
and disappear.

And listening
in the half light
beneath the
sound
of a single
brooding dove,

I try
to remember
my former life

and realize how quickly
the current travels
toward home,

how those
dark and irretrievable
blossoms of sound
I made in that time
have traveled
far-away
on the black surface
of memory

as if they no longer
belonged
to me.

As if my body might
feel lighter
without
their
weight
on what I have to say.

All night I followed
those currents
down to the sea
and finally
with that sweet
entangled
encouragement
we get
from greeting everything
we meet
along the way
as if we might
belong,

I sacrificed at the shores
of that great silence
my last possibility
for safety.

That’s why I speak
the way I do.
I’m like everything else,
I have no immunity.

That’s a fearful thing
to say
and having been there
you’ll know
how much it means.

- We humans must be
such strange
and reluctant
creatures to live with.

All those cries
in the night
with which we could join,
the fox
crying fox

and those winged
and silent creatures
of the dusk

dropping with
such fierce delicacy
onto the shrew’s
tremulous back.

Even when the owl
is silent
the shrew cries owl
into the black woods,
its life a last blaze
of sound
before the
small fire of its body
goes out.

Our own sounds
we refuse,
terrified as we are
to wake that voice
inside us,
waiting
with its wings folded
and its strange
expectant face.

The moment we try
to explain ourselves,
he moves those wings
to cover his face

and longs for
the wild
where cries
are involuntary things

and everybody
generously
gives their voice
to others,
even in their
last breath.

But this can be
no comfort,

knowing
the world
learns
the sound of its
own name
by dropping its
fearful weight
on us,
out of the dark,
when we least
expect,

so we can know the full
terror
of that love,

like the shrew
shrieking
its final gift-owl!

-from River Flow: New & Selected Poems; originally published in Fire in the Earth

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