Reading my poems of this period - the early 1980s - it is striking how often I returned to a meditation on what it means to be a consciousness aware of itself and how often I ended up pondering on, and falling silent before, silence - the silence within the self, the silence which enshrouds all the sounds of nature, and the silence of the universe, and within which I find hints of something more, something other.
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The days have drawn in: the first freezing
Night has squeezed indigo hands
On an abandoned geranium,
Slaughtering its watery
Tissues. Domestic junk in the shed
Grows a fungus of frost whilst
Delicately, sporadically, white
Spirit in a jar reflects
The solar system back at itself.
Despoiled on an ash heap a
Cindered guy unceasingly stares at
My lighted window where I
Pause to consider the platinum
Glow of the moon. What absence
Is this, what death, when every August
Thought, hewed into system by
The summer sun, thins to a breath on
The pane? I cheered myself with
The chatter of sparrows, the evening
Shout of the blackbird, but now
There is silence: soon, in the copse, the
Bodies will congregate, starved,
Abandoned like mittens in the snow.
It defeats me this silence –
Tongue-tied, impassible, attracted
By death; but what else can a
Victim cling to, propped-up, his lifeblood
Trickling over fingers like
A watchchain, before the sirens shriek
Their mourning? When the alleys
Are searched for their daily cargo of
Corpses, when a scream cuts short
In the Stuyvesant slums, we find them –
Slumped, puzzled by their detour
Into reticent matter, but blessed
By an icon-otherness,
Having slipped behind the silence and
Shrugged off the troubled splendour
Of their lives. Such absence is presence:
I pull curtains, huddle at
My fire, question the T.V. listings;
But the absence, the silence,
Inhabit my brain like knowledge. What
Thoughts are adequate to such
Impalpable pressure? Perhaps in
The end all it offers is
The bliss of extinction, a body
Subsiding in a shuffle
Of molecules. Or can a wise man,
Scooping the silence in his
Palm like water, feel the presence of
A Person, its fingers in
His hand, reassuring? Outside, the
Days fade toward December,
Winds shatter the deciduous woods,
Chastening my flesh to its
Dying. Philosophy, Socrates
Knew, is a practice for death.
At the end he lay down, a cloth on
His face, speaking hardly at
All. No one knew when he died. Once born
We must wait upon silence.
© November 1982
