Secular

Choral score

Text:

Wind-driven flakes beat a rhythm on my skin
As the air recites its blank hexameters of snow,
But the storm’s chant is in a tongue I do not know
And the poetry of air in a meter I cannot scan.

Who will read the river as a hieroglyph,
An illuminated letter on the manuscript of dawn,
As ideogram what wind has chiseled in the cliff,
All in an alphabet from which no words are drawn?

The world’s a book, a butterfly’s a poem on a page
We try to read, but with conviction in the bone
Of a depth we cannot sound, a drift we cannot gauge,
Of text and context and quiddity, and no Rosetta Stone.

- James Togeas