The Glass Harmonica

Awakened
By finger tips on glass
The murmurs of
Things that never were, the

Voices that never
Hooked
Their webbed toes
Around tongues

The fossils of thoughts

Are retrieved
From the silt where language
Becomes form,
Where ideas have fallen
From their skins
And disappeared.

Now dragged from the
Sea bed of their
Deaths, they

Inhabit the long notes
Gasp, and open their broken
Mouths, inflate their lungs, and
Afraid of dying,

Choose their mark, burrow
Like worms
Into the soft shell
Of my aching temples
And reverberate.