<p>This work was inspired substantially by W.S. Merwin's prose poem, <em>Echoes</em>. It reads:</p><p>      Everything we hear is an echo. Anyone can see that echoes move forward and backward in time, in rings. But not everyone realizes that as a result silence becomes harder and harder for us to grasp„though in itself it is unchanged, because of the echoes pouring through us out of the past, unless we can learn to set them at rest. We are still hearing the bolting of the doors of Thermopylae, and do not recognize the sounds. How did we sound to the past? And there are sounds that rush away from us: echoes of future words.</p><p>      So we know that there are words in the future, some of them loud and terrible. And we know that there is silence in the future. But will the words recognize their unchanging homeland?</p><p>      I am sitting on the shore of a lake. I am a child, in the evening, at the time when the animals lose heart for a moment. Everyone has gone, as I wanted them to go, and in the silence I call across the water, "Oh!" And I see the sound appear running away from me over the water in her white veil, growing taller, becoming a cloud with raised arms, in the dusk. Then there is such silence that the trees are bent. And afterwards a shock like wind, that throws me back against the hill, for I had not known who I was calling.</p><p><em>Echoes' White Veil </em>was commissioned by Marilyn Nonken, to whom it is dedicated, with great admiration.</p><p><em>Jason Eckardt.<br /></em></p>