Muted Thoughts

There is no way to paraphrase what I have heard,
no way to tell you what was said was this and what was meant was that
rather I would show it to you if I knew how
all the things that were said and all the voices that said them.
What is this thing that we hold here in our hands?
The gift of prophecy and exhortations, of showing mercy and interpreting tongues.
There is a place where the portal meets the door and the mountain rises from the land.
There is a place where some things come together and other things are broken
and when we gather together to join them someone will say
"I think that these things are separate" and others will say "they are together"
Many voices will rise and fall like the waves of some great ocean.
Like the poet says "these are not the memories that have passed each other
nor the yellowing pigeon asleep in our forgetting"
they fall around us like stars raining down on a dewy night and capture our breath and choke the sense from us till we are left dazed and wandering.

There are things that I would tell you about these things that I am not able
There are places that we should go and view these things together where we cannot go
there is a dry desert mesa that stretches into the horizon and a low pass that leads to the top
climbing together we might stop for a drink of water and prick our hands on the cactus and the bramble and become afraid and turn back before the sun began to set.
There is an forest where the sounds of the evening and the quiet of the morning pierce our hearing and drive us frightened like children before the pipes of pan till we lay gasping and terrified on some far away knoll and would look at each other in exasperation and say "was that you" and "was that you."

Here there are things that we can see together and call our own
The mine and the mine and the ours and the mine
that bleed together and dissolve into the white hot static of our sometime humdrum existence.
Someone is laughing and someone else is crying
there are voices here that try to guide us,
so many voices that they all seem to talk at once
come into the light and come into the light and come and come
there is a hand that covers my hand and a heart that covers my heart
there is a place where all these things are revealed
where all these things are known
But I cannot talk about it here, and I cannot talk.