“After silence, that which comes nearest
to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
— Aldous Huxley
“Music is the silence between the notes.”
— Claude Debussy
In 2012, I was graduating college after a long foray
into the west, into the Navy, into adulthood, into a marriage
that would finally give up its ghost only two years later.
My energy, my attention, was on the attempt to build
(to repair) a home & a life for two sons.
But other larva
were breaking branches where sewn a year before,
were falling to the soft soil, were feeding on sap of roots,
had begun that slow transformation into nymphs,
beneath the ground, until they would break again
the surface of the earth in 2025
& climb kilometers of trunks, bury themselves in cocoons to sexual
maturity, that wings might break through the flesh of their backs,
crack an exoskeleton, leave it behind, still clinging to the bark
like a cold, dead, statuary monument in honor, in memory,
of what they once had been.
Tonight, there is no song.
One month, more or less, saw their flight. One month that the skies felt
the thrill, the threnody, the rapture, the rhapsody, the vibration
across the skin of its clouds.
One month reserved for love
& search for love, & twinned creation of another
generation buried to bring life
thirteen years in the future
once again.
***
Another June comes & goes
without fireworks, without fanfare, without commencement or wake.
Another month, another day, splits the night of the year in two
with a yawn & a stretch—rolls over to close its eyes & drift again
into that slow fall
to its end.
& where I sit in the dark of my summer-night patio, legs crossed
like a ward against what remains (or does not) of the one life I get
to live, my throat holds the memory of vibration from when I sang
for you—for bedtime, for rest, for peace to wrap you
where my arms cannot.
My peace is in the peace
you ask & find
in the limited range
of my voice.
***
Did you know it is only the male cicadas who sing?
That let the notes of their longing resonate
through their otherwise-hollow bodies?
Did you know the females remain silent, listening?
Did you know that they cannot bite? Cannot sting?
That though you might feel a pinch, it is only
from the barbed-legs that allow them cling
& mature in their solitude against the bark?
Their song may vex & annoy, their voices
raise against the uninhabitable night
& the reality of their eminent death
or their fear of failing
to find a mate. But
they cannot lift a wing
against anything they find in that dark—
least of all their intended
or that union.
They would (& will)
sooner die than cast a shadow
of a doubt of their nature
against their moon.
***
You are not within my sight. You press your head
against the Schrödinger’s softness of a pillow, somewhere
four hours north of where I sit, singing, answering
your request for that act.
In the throaty, scratchy-velvet
of a voice slipping like molecules through the veil of sleep,
you make me promise. You say that no man has ever
given you this act, this love. You plead that I would
do this for you, every night, at the end of every day
of the rest of our life.
& I answer without a breath or a thought,
yes. Of course, & always, yes. Though no woman has ever
wanted to hear my song, or even see my old-fashioned
trembling. Only the sons who would call every night
they were away, leaving me pacing parking lots,
slow-dancing pools of light falling from poles,
passerby thinking me insane
as I sang
them to sleep.
But you do. I know you do.
So I do. In every melody, in every lyric,
in every lifetime—
I do.
***
The cicadas are so brief.
They are a mist, a vapor
in the exhale of a summer
so brief—a mist, a vapor—
amid the parasympathetic
system of a universe
& its lurid complexity
& its lingering
& expanding
truth.
What is a month?
What value exists,
can exist,
in a love & a life
so brief?
What am I
but one
of your
meteors?
***
In one month, we will break
this present distance & fly
to the place where you broke
through the skein of your mother—
the warmth of her womb,
the sanctuary of her body—
to the places where you broke
& were broken—left broken
open—by relationships & men
whose only songs screamed anger,
whose only voices chased you
fleeing into the darkness
of the night to find peace
& yourself & belief
in anything left buried
in your creation.
Together, whatever distance
we find will be our music
in the silence
between the notes
of hands that cannot hold,
lips that cannot touch,
tongues that cannot rise
or fall in a sigh
of what we know
to be truth.
Together, we will be
apart, until we can be
all we know
we can & will be
together. & then, & only then,
will we break ourselves
again, & ever again,
against the shores
of these shells
like an echo
of the waves
against the shores
of a place we’ve yet to go
together—until we break
& bury our love
in the depths
of what is left
of a life
together.
*** “What am I but one of your meteors” is a line from Walt Whitman’s Year of Meteors (1859-60) ***
