The Wind I Drink

Dexter Gordon: Days of Wine and Roses

No name.
No memory today
of yesterday’s name;
of today’s name,
tomorrow.
If the name
is the thing;
if a name in us
is the concept
of every thing
placed outside of us;
and without a name
you don’t have
the concept,
and the thing
remains in us
as if blind,
indistinct and undefined:

well then,
let each carve
this name that
I bore among men,
a funeral epigraph,
on the brow of
that image in which
I appeared to him,
and then leave it
in peace,

and let there be
no more talk about it.
It is fitting
for the dead.
For those
who have concluded.
I am alive
and I do not conclude.
Life does not conclude.
And life knows
nothing of names.
This tree,
tremulous pulse
of new leaves.
I am this tree.
Tree, cloud;
tomorrow book or wind:
the book I read,
the wind I drink.
All outside, wandering.

--Luigi Pirandello