The Porous Silence of the Vanished Name

It is not absolute void, nor absence of sound,
but a carved space, a breath of sweetness found
that the lip recovers, and then loses by magic.
A silence that filters, neither pure, nor so much
compact as to obstruct the trail of thought.
It is an invisible pore in the great vocabulary.

It allows memory to graze the threshold,
suspended for an instant, and then quickly strips
the awaited identity, the unspoken voice.
It is where the echo fails, and the mind accepts
that that vanished name has not entirely gone,
but breathes within an alveolus, light and hidden.