Holding Pattern

Silence a welcome respite
as the world’s tragedies carry on
without you.
It does not last, of course, this quiet as thin as the skin
of a drum.
You consider desertion
on its plastic hanger, how quick the fix.
But you ache for the succor of absolution
in its supple cloak, to have it fold around you,
ceding the demands of atonement.

The hush exists only in the absence of life
And not even there, not really.
What’s left is to telescope the antenna
and pluck a strand of restoration
from the sky.

From here it sounds like nothing
more than the hum of traffic.
The static in your head. Even so, it wings and dives
around a deaf and weary flesh
(we register so little of what feeds us)
as chords vibrate along the strings, a symphony
rising in crescendo
and a story of redemption in one tiny
voice breaking
from the throat of the earth.

You think the sky begins
above your head. As if it bobs at the end of a tether
knotted at your neck
whether you climb to the roof
or sprawl on the concrete ten stories below.
Remember: at your knees
coils the same cacophonous stuff
that draws your gaze to galaxies.

Today you try on disappearance
anyway, looking past the sale tag, the sloppy stitch.
Wearing that false silence
you spurn dimension,
your deafness a tin foil hat.

Even zipped into a cheap reprieve
you understand
your blood is not your own.
Seams made to last
cannot seal.
You leak.
We all do. Flesh and husk,
the flaxen stuff of lashed cells.
The trick is to allow osmosis
both ways. That even as you empty,
you fill.

It hurts all over again
to know you control so little of this. What rushes past.
What alights.

But you alone decide where the needle will fall,
what tune you pick up
and how you let its naked hide
hem to yours.

Image: Ann Nyberg, Mess of Blues