Taking It In Means Feeling Your Way

Taking It In Means Feeling Your Way

Speaker and hearer, words

making a passage between them,

begin a community.

                                    Wendell Berry

                                    “The Handing Down”

But no shoes of course,

nothing with strings—more like they give

slippers.  Shit, most things about this

cell is cliché except how the way

through each bar in the window

a shaft of light comes right

up to my fingertips and then

past them, like warm dry water,

and then past me entirely, and then

stunted or just put out all

together, or depending on the time

of day,  crawls down behind

the bed, a deep creep,

a Quasimodo grope for the bell

rope, the breast feather ends

of it tuff on his cheek.  Like my love’s

braid end on my lips just before I came in-

side.  See where one shaft of light

will take you?  If you listen close

the poet said you could hear

each flake of dust collide before they settle

forever together on the floor

in the corner.  About as close

as anything will ever get in here

and as mute as a barefoot hunchback

pulling that rope and that pause before, 
before the clapper and the iron and the weight
strike each other like the planned impact

and the sound hasn't made it out yet,
it's still inside his tendons, buzzing
like blind things hitting the unfamiliar.