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A sliver of sound, not made by winds
blowing through broken windows or stray grasses,
a random absence, an emptiness built
from the many-told meanderings of restless ancestral spirits
and stemming from a source
that separates each of your molecules
from the quiet beating of your own heart and producing a feeling
too slippery to grasp or even to consciously perceive,
steals quietly along the Canadian river valley.

Your poem is beautiful, soft and evocative. Thank you, Go Down, Moses.

Reminded me of that elusive intuition that Worsdworth spoke of (though I like your understated poem much more):

...For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth...

(from Lines composed a few miles above Tinturn Abbey)

imaginary friend wrote:Your poem is beautiful, soft and evocative. Thank you, Go Down, Moses.

Thank you, Imaginary Friend.

I wrote it to accompany this photograph for my website "Traces of Texas," where many of my images of Texas are accompanied by original poems. This shed is located in the Canadian river valley in north Texas. i originally started out with "A slipper of sound" instead of "A sliver of sound" and I have been going back and forth between the two words, each of which modifies, of course, the sound. On the one hand, "slipper" evokes the kind of quietness that you are talking about. On the other hand, "sliver" represents a very tiny, minute amount of sound. I like both words. But my idea was to take this sliver of sound and describe how it was NOT made and what it IS capable of even though it is a very soft sound.