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
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poem by Patrick White
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