It's Still Life

This poem is inspired by Spira’s Edo era music creation, and I highly recommend that you listen to his creation. Language, here, is not a melody but a collection of lacquered shards — each word a resonant fragment. The music lives in the gaps, in the negative space (ma), and in the reader’s act of golden repair (kintsugi).

Kintsugi’s Language of Lacquer

Language becomes the lacquer.
Silence becomes the seam.
Gold is metaphor.
Absence, the instrument.

Language, wind-born —
singing, swept under.
Milkweed brush,
brass-scented.

Silence, deeper than black,
on the soft edge
of a string
bound tight.

Language of leaves —
freedom’s speech
a feather carving sky

A breath-held note
in the bell’s throat,
just before
the bronze is struck.

Dust holding the sun’s slant —
ghost of a rhythm
pressed in a pillow.

Echo of a plectrum
a thread —
a vibration lost
in the ear.

This syllable-shard
of shattered vase;
this pause, gold dust
in a traced break.

Not song, but space —
a note left behind,
on its tongue,
a print
in the air’s dark peat.

We listen not to the note,
but to the hollow
from which it fled —
from the vessel
it escaped,
on moonlight.