He thrums his dumb grief-infused surges into the bedrock
tries to carve something out of something already carved out

already so hollow, that to press further, is to tear through
like a clumsy potter’s hands on a wheel of clay.

The next wave comes, and then the next.
Thunderous clatter on thunderous clatter.

His grief, a song that doesn’t know how to end
keeps playing its pre-Cambrian meter

loud and cantankerous as the tectonic rumbling
of the seafloor, pounding its way with want to break through

to some Eurydice beneath the sea. That isn’t there,
that doesn’t hear his music because it will never

have an audience that listens for more than a barre
or two. Species will arrive then go extinct

before they develop the proper ears for this melody
like the flash of lightning that dances ahead of the thunder

this erosive need, these heavy lyrical vibrations
in place of sentences, of letters. The voice of a wave,

energy-contained, crashes, and releases his song
of saturated sea-swell to split the canyon open.

And yet, somehow, the music weaves itself in,
his verses braid itself with the winter storms

which get buried in the rock of the earth that reverberates
and waits until one of us, lazily places an ear to the dirt and listens.