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POEMS BY JUDITH SEARLE FROM: "IN THE TEETH OF TIME" |
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MUCH
DEPENDS
Much
depends
upon
perspective:
there
are those that hear
the
sounds of music
and
those that hear
the
silences.
IN
THE TEETH OF TIME
Music heard so deeply
That
it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While
the music lasts.
--T.S.
Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"
The
violinist is dying, the pianist is dying, all of us
in
this high-ceilinged room on our chairs are dying.
The
roses in the sunlight streaming through the windows
are
dying, though their scent is strong.
Outside
a dog howls as the violin pours forth
its
intricate filigree, its amazing leaps and moans.
Poor
howling dog, howling for all of us sitting here
on
this Sunday afternoon in the teeth of time.
We
are forever brothers and sisters,
held
together in this womb, birthed
through
the throes of the music into the sunlight.
We
howl with pain and joy.
This
musk of mortality mixes with the fragrance of the roses.
The
moans and sobs of the violin are indistinguishable
from
the blood leaping in our veins on this
Sunday
afternoon in the kingdom of forever.
The
cutting edge of time is essential to the ecstasy.
The
performers are our high priests, flinging themselves
into
the silence to bring back treasures for the tribe,
which
we devour in this ritual communion.
We
ride their backs as if on dolphins,
soaring
into the sunlight scattering diamonds,
plunging
through the depths, lungs bursting,
our
exuberance edged with panic.
In
this moment of alchemy, discipline is inseparable from freedom,
fierceness
from tenderness, focus from abandonment.
The
music is a lover with a hundred hands, and we are reeling
with
the sudden touch of sound after a moment of silence.
Worth
it to be mortal on a day like this,
with
the sunlight, the roses,
the
music rising to heaven, swooping back
to
earth, our vehicle to eternity.
SILENCES
This
thing I want to say,
I
can find no words to say it,
to
cleanly pin it down.
But
let me start with the silences.
It
has something to do with silences:
the
silences in music without which
no
music exists,
the
silence which contains the music
and
is contained by it,
yin
to the notes' yang.
Or
those moments of silence between people,
enemies
of the word-oiled social machine,
moments
bursting with what
can't
be spoken, won't be spoken.
(If
it could, would the universe fly apart?)
Yes,
there may be a clue in the silences.
Or--to
say (or not say) it another way--
in
the incidents and accidents
of
which we forge our identities:
this
peculiar blue of eye,
that
distinctive nose,
the
genetic accident of
thus-and-such
male or female body.
Or
the happenstance of incidents
treasured
up in memory
and
called our past,
of
which we make poems and psychoanalysis.
This
same collection
of
neural traces in the brain
leads
us to say we know another person,
hoarding
in common
different
memories of the same incidents,
these
incidents as much accidents
as
the blue eyes and the distinctive nose.
Memory
being a great editor,
it
edits out the silences,
keeping
only the words, rearranged neatly
for
the sake of harmony with other memories.
Thus
the past becomes comfortable, orderly,
a
refuge from this dangerous, subversive moment.
If
you and I knew each other before,
in
other incarnations,
as
some sensitives say we did,
is
it any wonder we cannot remember,
having
blinkered our eyes with these images
of
what we call reality:
my
having such-and-such breasts
and
the rest of the female apparatus,
you
with your pride of male equipment,
and
yes, this passion and poetry
and
sense of shared events.
What
do I mean when I say
I
know you?
When
I say to someone
He
knows me?
Do
I, seeing a few puffs of smoke
rising
from a crevice,
know
the fire raging
in
an underground cavern?
Can
you drink the water
of
the deep springs
that
bend your dowsing stick
as
you walk on granite?
Physicists
in their quantum universes
talk
of "worm holes" linking
one
stratum of existence with another:
simultaneous
multiple versions of you and me
scurrying
back and forth
like
mice in tunnels of Swiss cheese,
nibbling
at past and future,
memories
and fantasies.
How
often do we share a universe?
An
instant here and there--
not
in the obvious places one would think,
like
love, but strangely, fleetingly
in
those moments when we look for sharing least:
moments
seen slantwise out of the corner of the eye,
dissolving
when looked at too directly.
The
separations perhaps, the silences.
No,
I have not managed to say
this
thing I want to say.
But
the truth is there somewhere
in
the silences.
DREAMING
YOU
for
Basil
It
is May again, my darling, nearing
the
anniversary of the day you left your body.
The
other night in a dream you said to me,
"I've
lost my little radio." I know the one --
still
in the top drawer of our bedside table,
but
lost to you along with your body
and
my body. The living and the dead
are
on different frequencies, it seems.
I
trust you hear me when I speak to you now,
despite
the silence that follows my words.
There
is a voice I hear sometimes
when
I am missing you most intensely.
It
says, "Look around you."
During
the last years, when I would go to New York
alone,
you would ask me to visit
certain
art exhibitions for you. It seemed
that
you could suck up the experience
directly
from my consciousness
by
the sheer force of your longing.
Why
did I not see before your departure
that
the deepest bond between us
was
our shared passion for beauty?
I
still seek on my walks each day
one
new beautiful thing to share with your spirit:
forsythia
spraying its yellow jets against a black rock,
a
ruby-throated hummingbird hovering in the air,
the
gaiety of wind-whipped daffodils,
sunlight
on the leaves of a Japanese maple,
the
spiral structure of a calla lily,
an
avenue of flowering jacarandas,
the
magenta velvet spikes of Mexican sage flowers,
the
fragile glory of a bearded iris.
Our
white orchid plant"a gift for your ninetieth birthday"
now has thirty-one blossoms.
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