How the deaf, to whom everything is a beat,
feel music pulse throughout the body.

Or the dumb when they hear it--
something they can’t say.

What the abalone offers
to the hands that plucked it from the sea.

To be inside the rhythm,
to be swimming as surf hits the bay--

There is nothing absent.
Something fills the space of sound, like the spray

of pine where birds chirrup, or the mosaic
in the church where the pastor gives his homily.

A feeling resonates from the neck to the knees
but it does not stay.

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