each knows by heart:/ Remember me, speak my name." The dead are of course
finally us, and our projections of memory and desire, so their obsessive storytelling and
singing, their pitiful dependence on speech, is our own. There’s something circular and
meaningless in our constant conversing with them, they with us, something that may go
nowhere but serves a little to relieve our sense of loss and separation: "Our words
are words for the clay, uttered in undertones,/ Our gestures salve for the wind." To
clay or trying to heal the wind is ridiculous, but it is the story of our lives and of our
dependence upon words.
From "The Blood Bees of Paradise." Field 44 (1991)
36b