Night in the hall of long acoustics, the whispering gallery 
      from which no sound, once made, escapes 

nor any no-sound: feel the ripples when a drop 
      of silence falls into the pool of itself
              and shivers out through me. 

Nights when I’m climbing down the rusty ladder 
      of my spine, into the ringing cistern. 

Here, the last and least gasp of my breath 
      will live beyond itself, beyond me, 
              exhaled into the afterlife. 

Belly-creeping a cave, the thirteenth chamber back, 
      beyond the sump, the dunk-immersion 

like a baptism into the oldest of dark, I came up 
      to twenty bat-scrap shadows dangling
              above their own reflections; 

my world flipped over, cut adrift from gravity.
      Whatever they laced the air with then 

was beyond my any sense.  Nights like these
      in the hollows of my body, of my brain,
              that inscape without size 

whose one dimension is its history, not only my own 
      but words that squat among its rafters. 

Nights when I’m walking streets of an abandoned city,
      round me silhouetted on bare girders, 
              silent letters of the alphabet, 

maybe ready to peel crackling into flight, 
      a veering smoke of them, a psalm

unfurling, a combustion of the airwaves – or 
      maybe etched in charcoal, petrified 
                already where they stood.