I LISTEN TO THE SILENCE

I LISTEN TO THE SILENCE

I listen to the silence, not the ambassador birds of the message

aligned along the branch of a black tree,

waiting to have their say, deliver

the formal meaning; I follow them back

to the original fountain-mouth of the silence

that isn’t dawn or sunset, or a woman in a garden,

but a clear light with the presence of a feather

and, almost at times, a face, that’s always been there

behind the racket and the paint rags

of the cacophonous actors gathering on stage,

the understudy that hovers like a silver fish

in the reeds and the shadows of the undulant curtains,

rarely seen, and more of a fragrance of light

than a second queen, an unverifiable void

with delicate gestures that turn all my questions

back on me like the soft underside of milky green leaves,

as if something took my hand and turned it over

to show me the answers pearled in my palm.

And it would be wrong to attribute eyes to this silence

though I feel it’s the space where the seeing happens

in the beginningless moment before

the watcher and the watched rework the seeing up into a play

of heroes, villains, events, and fireflies of awareness

in a chronic struggle of opposites.

And it would be wrong to accord it a mouth, lips, a tongue

because it seems to say everything

without saying anything, without

wounding itself on the quick edge of a word. And there are times

when it almost seems to smile upon my childish efforts

to know what it is, to return to the sea,

to the corals of the moon, with my hands full of cherries and stars,

the abundance of living on the earth

with waterlilies and rat snakes.

It indulges me with the serenity of an old, unknown sorrow

that had to create the world to speak itself to the end

and now sits enthroned in the emptiness of its own presence.

And just when I think I’ve come up against its impassable clarity

like a fly against a windowpane;

I discover myself immersed in it like an eel

undulating like a free banner of water

through its unpartitioned enclosure,

hardly a wavelength of distinction between myself and it;

and everything I write is an oracle

that swims away knowing more about it than I do

before I decided not to ask it for a name.

And though it may have been the voiceless cachet

of the divine numinosities that opened

the resplendent roses of the past

that squandered their eyelids on asphalt and scripture,

the watershed of the snow-robed mountain gods,

now it’s a drop of water holding its breath like the moon

at the tip of the green sword of the cattails

ready to send a shudder of tears and blood and fruit

through the mirror again like the first pulse

of its falling into existence, hazelnuts into the mouths

of waiting salmon, things losing their balance

against the backdrop of the hidden harmony

by which they are created in the image of their own conception

and known: apple-blow from the orchard

or ashes from the nightshift crematoria.

And, perhaps, this is that silence that seizes the heart with the love

of an unsayable emptiness as infinite as the beloved

that can’t be filled by anyone less,

as a question must be returned like a wave to the sea that asked it

before it realizes on the threshold of its own depths

there never was a brevity of being

that hasn’t always been the perfect answer.

PATRICK WHITE