The Lost Language 20

When I want a thing, I put a little
music in my voice. It comes by instinct,
the hunger in the song before it is sung,
and so, I imagine, it never goes away.
A new language comes out of no one
person or place and a little of the all.
When I think of my father I think
of words turning into water. I think
therefore I stream his music in my head.
My measure of him phrased, desired, mourned.
Hard to resurrect the world without
a world left out, to make our losses sing.
Where there is one, there must be two.
I too am scared. Paradise is lonely.

Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-three books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), and Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018). Five books are forthcoming including Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas.