RECEI|VED WISDOM - Poem

  RECEIVED WISDOM

(Copyright 2018, by Dave Kiffer)
It is nigh possible
That he used up
All his words before
He turned twenty
He was always quiet,
Which we took for depth
And when he spoke
We listened with all our might
Even when the thoughts
Didn’t seem to hold together
We took them as adages
As if he were Aesop
Mostly he spoke about
The weather, a metaphor
We thought, for life
Or its approximate
As the years passed
He even stopped talking
About the clouds, rain,
Or the color of the sky
Soon we learned to parse
His expressions, the tilt
Of his chin, the number
Of times he blinked
He even chewed mute
But not so mute that we
Didn’t hear every word
He didn’t say

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