The Silver Branch and the Otherworld

 This poem, which appears near the end of The Silver Branch and the Otherworld ...a dying friend's final manuscript:

It is a strange and treacherous excavation,
the archaeology of the memory in our blood
that’s older than our bones

Sometimes a wound or a scar is the entry point.
but you must not get stuck there,
in the hot and stagnant
			festering pools that form,

or beneath them
in the frenzied, hungry wailing
that becomes the storm
that drives the poison
			to the surface.

You must dig deeper,
deep enough to see the stars at noon
and there you will hear
a voice in the darkness

giving the stones their names,
singing forests into being,
laying the first notes of the music
that was supposed to call water and earth
into the form of a body
that would shape your ancestors' breath
into a song that could wake
the dead within us.

The music is not lost.
Yours is just to match the singer's rhythm and pitch,
and remember the next note and the next,
until at last you play your movement of the symphony
into resolution

and a voice to come
begins to harmonize with yours
as yours falls into silence
and the music takes and shapes
			another instrument
and summons another world.