Not It at All

The soul is a word.
All things are words,
They grow hands and feet.
They are born whole,
meaning what they mean
then erode
with mountains melting, and
the end of glaciers.
They wear out like time
and build new towers
for bells and telescopes,
huts of reed
replaced by palaces of glass,
and poems inside us
become exhausted
wearing out shoes,
disappearing as the words
that composed them die,
and our hearts grow old,
with new shoes and faces
not quite saying who we are.