Dandarians. Lee Ann Roripaugh

dog-day cicada, stranded on its back on the path, rattling its dry gourd of a body with a mechanical windup toy’s stutter and twitch.

      All rescinded after a single morning’s chilled rain. Leaf prints mold-scored onto asphalt. An immolation of orange and yellow burnings stilled to silhouetted ash and char.

       (The imprint of your body fading too quickly from my bed.)

      Was it an erasure, or was it a swallowing? Or the shimmered turning of a purse inside out to reveal the silky lining?

      Leaves glisten. The dock is drizzle-slick. Sky an uncertain pearling of abalone.

       (And yes, I have been turned utterly inside out.)

      So what other choice is there, if not to simply give oneself up to the rain—to glisten, shine, and pearl uncertainly into this very absence, this same ache, this lambent and indefinite quiet?

GRIOTS’ SIGNPOSTS

       At this point in time many things have come together as a result of listening to the silence that exists before sound is made. This silence is also present before every action that we initiate in life. It is at these moments that we can see the movements and inner workings of flow. Flow is the spontaneously created map that leads us to the center of sound, the essential house where all beauty resides. Through silence, ancient griots have left signposts for the modern griot to learn from, formulas that change according to who is bowing the violin or sarangi, and who is blowing the flute, trumpet, or saxophone.

      — William Parker, liner notes to Sound Unity

      1.

      By the river, blue-striped oyster mushrooms frill a hollowed-out tree stump. They riffle in the breeze like accordion bellows, wheezing and sighing old-time polkas maybe only grubs and other fungi can hear.

      Redheaded woodpeckers sequestered in a nearby stand of trees. Up there, in their clerestory of air, they watch and wait—guarding their live hoard of grasshoppers taken hostage and wedged into tight slats of bark. Do the woodpeckers flick their glittering eyes over the stuck churning of captive muscled legs as if to say, shhh shhh? Or is that just the taffeta swish and whisper of rustling leaves?

      Stand quietly, and the woodpeckers will forget you—resuming their drilled percussion, their call-and-response drumming. Each tree with different notes, timbres, and tones. Each woodpecker drumming unique sequences of paradiddles, flamacues, and dragadiddles. Beaks blurred sticks trading solos in a cutting contest of tour-de-force drumnastics. Flamboyant tongues turbaned inside their skulls to cushion their brains from concussion.

      Waiting in that silent moment before sound, does time expand into the quiet like the purple rustle of musk thistle colonizing the riverbanks in June? And what would it be like to run rampant like this in those muted, infinite spaces between pulse beats? To not take for granted what happens after? To teeter on the precipice of the next?

      Sometimes, when the river is frozen, you worry about carp and gar and catfish—imagining them temporarily suspended in ice, in medias res, like the fire-shaped, lampworked fish in Murano glass aquariums.

      And then wind’s flame scalpels right through you. As in dreams, your mouth gasps open to sing or scream, but your voice is stolen from your throat—corkscrewing to sky like a runaway kite.

      2.

      Bright and quiet. Soft fitful gusts knock the hollow bamboo chimes on the balcony—they riff their under-the-breath xylophonic mutterings, while the heavy bell chimes mostly sway in silence.

      Although metal pipes sometimes brush up against one another for a moment—a faint blush of sound, a slight peal, an awkward ringing cough.

       (As if they were on the verge of saying something. But they don’t.)

       (Of tumbling into random, jumbled, inchoate song. But they don’t.)

      How to hold all that light and cold and sound inside without coming undone, unglued, unbuttoned, unraveled? Without mortgaging yourself to the wind for keeps?

      Freckled grit of a pear skin spiraling in even, green coils onto a hushed plate.

      3.

      Like the aimless quaver of television static, snow asterisks night air’s quiet typography. But then wind comes bounding up out of the dark. A feral thing grown much too large too fast. It shimmies loose the windowpanes, insinuates itself in through the cracks. It trades fours with the furnace and hurls itself against the door like a spurned lover.

      No matter where you go, it will not let you be.

      Meanwhile, around midnight, under the metal halide lamps at the Hy-Vee parking lot, snow Spirographs—all parabolic hustle and lasso in this frozen discotheque of glamorous sizzle, glint, and glitter.

      This hushed tundra. Only wind’s gap-toothed whistle and the lisping, sibilant fricatives of blowing snow.

      Scraped blister of ice on the windshield: cicatrix of water that yields too easily to heat and antifreeze before immediately refreezing into a new keloid. The same way you yield up your own loneliness too easily to the hot drawn bath, to the disconsolate blue wash of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue—flushed cheek chilling against the claw-foot tub’s icy porcelain.

       (Shrimp in the colander slackening in their shells under the tap. Clams coming unhinged in the steamer basket. Lobster claws ringing the sides of the pot like the struck tongues of bells.)

      This unease, the disrupted complacencies, that wildness in the dark. You soften and pink in heat and steam. Doors and windows blow wide open.

      Outside, fleecy herds of black clouds stampede a wan yellow half-moon who lingers in the sky like a fermata. (A pause. Caesura. Breath waiting to happen.) Effaced moon staring into nebulous space, listening to the unreliable narration of the wind—woolgathering moon, who daydreams the entire night out of silence into the brittle, silver tinfoil of winter morning’s birds.

TROMPE L’OEIL: THE ANNOTATED VERSION

      Sun’s yolk a greasy sputter in morning’s blue Teflon.¹

      Glare of birdsong a platinum grinding. Turning and turning and turning. Unstoppable tinfoil cranking. It yanks the leash. Arms pushed through the red velvet vest.² Time for the monkey—wild and ugly, as most frightened things are—to clap and clank its tinny impotent cymbals.

      An agitation of rubbings: crickets and katydids nervously finger the horizon, flaking away the gilt edge from daybreak’s chipped rim.³

      Silk moths cloister themselves in the secret creases of box elder, birch, and sugar maple.⁴ Tender mouths like busy spool looms drooling an obsessed thread from their spinnerets—entire miles of seracin and filament—to kimono the brazen nakedness of their ripening bodies, a profanity of fierce spiracles.

      The day’s clotted knotwork divides and subdivides. Fetus with a tight red fist. Tangled skein of yarn, unraveling arteries, pulling and pulling. Rasp and scratched tug of red wool. (Red Heart yarn. Three-ply. Worsted.) Lost thread, dropped stitch, snipped. Insistent tick of knitting needles with their too-bright clicking and fretting and clicking.⁵

      What gets buried.⁶ So many secretive tubers and roots, all simmering underground. They gestate, pulse, and bulge, almost radioactive in their insistent tumescence—febrile root hairs whiplashing the homely earthworm-kissed faces of moles blindly tunneling by.

      In this mute coolness, you wonder why you must always sequester yourself into the primitive fetal curl and whorl of the snail—why do you always gather yourself back up into yourself—when what you really want is to howl and screech and keen?⁷ To wail and shriek and scream? Long and loud. From treetops. Like peacocks.