To Listen

In the dream of death where I listen, the voices of the dream
  keep diminishing, fading away.
The dead are speaking, my dead are speaking, what they say seems urgent,
  to me, to themselves,
but as I try to capture more clearly what I heard just moments ago, the
  voices ebb and it’s lost;
what’s more, my impatience to know what was said seems to drive it further
  out of my ken.
In the dream of death where I listen, I keep thinking my dead have a
  message for me:
maybe they’ll tell me at last why they must always die in the dream, live,
  die, die again.
I still can’t hear what they say, though; I force my senses into the silence
  but nothing is there.
Sometimes I listen so hard I think what I’m waiting to hear must already
  have been spoken,
it’s here, its echo surrounds me, I just have to learn to bring it more clearly
  within me
and I’ll know at last what I never thought I would know about death and
  the dead and the speech
of affection the dead speak that stays on in the sentient space between living
  and after.
For the dead speak from affection, dream says, there’s kindness in the
  voices of the dead.
I listen again, but I still hear only fragments of the elaborate discourse the
  dead speak;
when I try to capture its gist more is effaced, there are only faded words
  strewn on the page
of my soul that won’t rest from its need to have what it thinks it can have
  from the dead.
Something is in me like greed now, I can’t stop trying to tear the silence
  away from the voices,
I tear at the actual voices, though I know what the dead bring us is not to
  be held,
that the wanting to hold it is just what condemns dream to this pained,
  futile listening,
is what brings dream finally to its end, in silence, in want, in believing it’s
  lost,
only for now, my dream thinks, at least let it be only for now, my forsaken
  dream thinks,
what the dead brought, what the dead found in their kind, blurred, weary
  voices to bring.