You Must Remember This (5 page)

The seashell whorls of my ears hold barely two-thimbles-

worth of sky but without those twin pockets of stratosphere

thrumming my drums the world would fall as silent as a world

where they had inexplicably fed their own kind into steel machines.

Later, visiting archaeologists might ponder what had driven them

to do such a thing? There might be conjecture about belief systems

or native religions but for the first thousands of years there would be

nothing but the sound of ash sifting through dried leaves, a sound that is

in some ways similar—but also different—from the sound of falling snow.

Look, he said, and pointed

the clouds were different

from the blue ones

that had carried

so much cool rain

and broken the back

of the heat last night

these clouds were

knotted tight

and made of human

limbs and torsos

towering into the sky

that's why

they call it

whether, he said

but no one got it

or if they did

no one cared

because someone

was passing binoculars around

and even though

we all took turns

we could not find

a single entire human

body in that towering cumulus

only different part

after different part

woven tightly

and threatening

to pock the roofs

with bone-hail

and fill the gutters

with warm red rain

Aria

I have a particularly thick shaft

is something a porn star might say

using a deceptively mundane tone

in the midst of a job interview

at a Santa Monica café. He might

slide a Polaroid across the table

nudging aside a basket of hand-cut

fries and a small tin of lemon aioli

so the man in sunglasses could

make sense of his tumescence.

What if that producer began to sing

in gorgeously enunciated Italian

an aria of unornamented intonation

that bespoke genuine emotion

regarding the loneliness of the flesh

caught in a flashbulb and framed

like some sort of battered criminal.

Would the rest of the seated crowd

raise their voice in swollen chorus?

Perhaps the man who slid the picture

would fall to his knees weeping,

astonished at the understanding

finally granted to his member,

astonished to have found himself

crying in a poem about his cock.

from A Natural History of Silence

So many silences: think

the clink of poolside gin and tonics,

ice clattering as it spins in the glass then the underwater

hush of submersion

as you sink below the surface, hair wavering like fire.

Also, the sound of bitter words unsaid

hovering in the room like a loosed eel

momentarily stunned in the chill.

Then there is the pause of locked eyes

in the midst of lubricious wrangling

upstairs, before the shudder.

The quiet of the porcelain

cup in the cupboard.

The one with the chipped lip

that never speaks.

The blue-green stillness

of the robin's egg

discarded from the nest.

The silence

of the loaded gun.

The silence of stone

differing, quietly, from the silence of iron.

The cello groaning

into the tuned calm

that precedes the song.

Beneath the pines

a single needle falls. It

ticks
into the duff.

What about the slender

nothing between the next

two words.

Or the endless inhalation

before the piercing air-horn