Silence
by Brian Swann
which way the day goes depends on the winds and where it ends depends on their shadows and where I’ve been depends on words which are always too thin and too quick so I’m left grasping to snag their skins and crawl inside and
go back into dream where I wander about wondering who’s the original and who’s the Aztec impersonator and who’s wearing who
+ + + + +
until I wake in the dark, wordless, throw on some clothes, go to the door sure I heard something like the snap of bone, click of manacle, fading barks of dogs, and push the door open slowly, thinking I see dark figures moving, rousing turkeys in the draw, and I set off under dimming star-routes until in the distance I think I see a house much like the one I left but too bright to be visible, so I return and begin my day, another day of
+ + + + +
picking at myself
chewing nails down to nubs, filing and shaping, squeezing pores, scratching the scalp bloody, clipping, shaving, gouging, trying it seems to dig myself out to a wordless core, as if something’s there, or vanish the way my father did sticking blades into his ears, working himself into bottles like a four-master, or my sister cutting herself, or my mother addicted to enemas and neti pots
+ + + + +
while time goes by as spun glass, shining echoes, rivers on which I drift downstream, floating over drowned towns whose voices rise and flow around rocks, form figures in smoke, shadows of the shadowless, and when I look up there are trees expressing sky with migrating birds, until the pole-star turns, grinding from eternity time in which a year’s a month, a month a day, a day an hour, an hour a minute which is enough for me to listen for the hermit thrush who each day prays the sun up out of the ground, floats it over the rough wall that opens flowers of the trumpet-vine, here where time drifts beyond itself, and keeps going, silent
Published on May 23, 2019