just clangorous muting. Then, by degrees:
‘an expressive
aphasia,' say the doctor's notes. Too true.

As if released
from ninety years of reticence, the sentences
unreel
in grand gestural sweeps, like starlings wheeling,

a high rhetoric
in which only you seem not to know
that the meaning is gone,
regathered elsewhere maybe — but from here

it's all rattle and flux
till a stray phrase drops from the sky, a
but anyway ...
you know ... ? You know where you are. Me,

I'm the boy who turns
at the call of a bird, that seemed to speak
a syllable,
his name, in the darkening wood.