NOISE SEEPING INTO THE SILENCE

NOISE SEEPING INTO THE SILENCE

Noise seeping into the silence.

The apartment groans, cracks it knuckles.

The gas furnace flares, a poppy, a matchbook,

and as things heat up, the tin pipes

keep making spasmodic rimshots on the drums,

then cooling off, you can hear

the last heavy, ripe drops of rain

on a metal roof with no walls

as he imagines it, somewhere in Burma

where the bacteria have such an appetite for life

they eat books down to the spine

and the glue that binds them

like a creekbed of milky honey

that’s cracked with use and time.

And all the letters of all the words,

nothing but flies in amber paperweights.

You take the dirty laundry of a life time

and you wash the blood and semen

off the sheets, the sweat-stained outlines

of a he and a she that made lust

to exhaust themselves and go to sleep

like the chalk silhouettes of two corpses on the street.

And you hang them on the line

like a computer screen blowing in the wind

on a sunny summer afternoon

for the neighbours to see

how much like them you are

when you’re both wearing the same disguise

like clean bedsheets with no evidence of life.

A tabla rasa. A cheery white void.

Snow on a desolate sidewalk late at night

that no one’s walked in before you

showed up to ruin it with your presence.

Footprints on the moon. The estranged signs

of a starless space within

that keeps a journal of our innocence

and its aborted attempts to shine.

He watches the smoke of a cigarette

shaped by the air it passes through

and thinks of the bucolated cosmology

of his last lover’s hair, black walnut

with Bronze Age touches of infra-red.

He remembers her taking her clothes off

in master strokes of candlelight

that painted a Rembrandt of her likeness

and realizes however naked

she stood before him on Wednesday night,

there were still skins to shed,

layers upon layers of metaphor

as divisible as an atom

or the pages of a book

that’s written in wavelengths

that go on forever

beginning where they left off.

And even nude beside each other in bed

they were still too dressed up for the occasion.

And even the silence and the solitude

don’t go far enough into the abyss

not to be warped like space

by the mass of a metaphor

concentrating its light in one place

like a serpent sleeping in its coils

with its head on the pillow it makes

of the endless wavelengths of itself,

an emergency firehose encased in glass

dreaming of what snakes dream of

when they’re not called upon to put things out

by swallowing the moon in a single gulp

to bring the rain on

in this white Sahara of snow,

listening like a mirage

that wished it had something to cry about,

to the eyes of big rain drops

falling on the tin roofs of Burma

like a gas furnace

learning to play the drums

like a novice John Bonham

in Led Zeppelin’s next afterlife

in the dead of winter,

in the dark hours of the morning

in Perth, Ontario, Canada

in an apartment that thinks it’s a band

warming up,

doing a sound check before the show.

PATRICK WHITE