POOL

JENNIFER CLARVOE

In the Nights of Cacophony

not in the nights before creation, but after
Eden; when static crackled, and sound was
thick, not as in thickets
	riddled with snakes/hoots/lightning/vines; but because
of statistics; fifty-seven clicks & flickering channels

pitched to the galaxy, saturation was a chattering
of the particular, outgoing messages
from answering machines; now it is all
	we have and then some; or does the sweet cool hum
of fridge and fluorescent that sang “home” hold its own?  It was never

about anything more than itself, the familiar.  Read
	to me; family is not a game, now drop
everything.  Silence.
	No thing, no song.  Simplicity,
though, that whistles in the dark, and never

notices itself to be the benison it is, flutes high
	and low, not to guide us with some chirpy
dicta that acceptance 
	will contain loss and that no
lie bleats and blares.  On the tip of the tongue, what is plain is about

to change – singing in the inmost heart of the final
	tiny lies.  All of it is silent, all of it
is about to fall silent, is any of it
	clamorous in the air?  In the strong-lunged, force-
ful good-byes, the megaphone and all the media, we have the tritest

single-mindedness, some think, thank god.  Deception is no Gog
	and Magog, no formless chaos.  It up and does.  The moon
shudders in the cosmos like a gong.  And it is so long gone, the silence after
	the signing off, out of hearing, out of here.

 

   

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