thou wast not born for death. Printed on a small surface, a poem addressed to a bird told the bird so. But then the bird entered the past tense, leaving the poem behind in the present. Said the poem to itself, silently: “Fled is that music.”

Afterward, on a large surface, these other words were printed:

“cheese-box”

Head-Phone

Watcher-of-the-Silent-Places

Quote:

Silently, on their paper, for the time that was then being, they were a promise of something not on the paper: unsilence. But they were nouns, not verbs. They were a promise that could be but not be made. Listen in again, a century later, and confirm: promised unsilence has failed to descend over the Port-of-Missing-Men. The promise’s  typographical manifestation, this decor of quotation marks and hyphens and capital letters, is a written language, not a spoken language. Just above its surface, the air is still still.