No Sweeter Song

Who was that visitor yesterday, wearing your emblematic clothes, speaking in your voice, giving every sign that he understands message, has taken it deeply within, into the core of his being? His sudden arrival blinded me. Is he to be trusted the way I trust you, which is akin to greeting summer's earliest dawns? The throat of every songbird is poised with sound, but they will sing no sweeter song than what you sang in GABRIEL and A PERSIAN RAPTURE. Yet cardinals fall silent in their sheltering trees, then blue jays, robins, even sparrows will join the same expectancy. And I myself, ever awaiting my next poem, will still pause in the deepest breath that I can hold, because your voice may be carried by a breeze blowing softly into the southern region, or a sudden wind presaging rain, or a fiercer wind remembering our primal desires... I ask again, who was that yesterday man I saw on the edge of light? And an answer arises from deep within my Psyche: He is, as Whitman envisioned, A ROUND FULL-ORB'D EIDOLON... wandering freely abroad, even as you are in the pathways of your mind. What if he merges with you for a spell, adopts language, becomes the prophet and the bard, who sweep the present to the infinite future. OR are the countrymen still in charge, still IMMENSE IN PASSION, PULSE, AND POWER, and one just returned from your presence tells us. 'Be watchful! Be Patient! He is with us still! '