Seeking Silence

around noises

I am seeking silences.

Silences, but not the kind between two pillows pressed around my head. I seek the sort of silences that sound finds itself in, the negative spaces around the waves that my ears collect for my brain. What is the shape around the sound of the ladder sliding off the truck or the leaf moving along the ground? Where is the empty space in the concert hall before the lights dim, and how does the halting of hundreds of quiet conversations change its sonic shape? What pockets of four-dimensional experience are being formed around the thick waves of bass from that low riding Civic? Through its roots, would a tree know the vibrations of another collapsing under the weight of snow? What is the shape of the silence around violence? Or is it more of a flavor? Is it something you taste or smell after the fact of it or perhaps in the prequel to it? Olfactory or not, doesn’t a force move through the non-visible not-vacuum space between erect arm hairs? Isn’t the iris responding to something? Isn’t that silence?

Silences, but not the kind that happen when a speaker pauses and the room is in rapture. I seek the sort of silences like a book page where ink isn’t or a screen where blackness is. I seek the lie in the reflection, the part of the light that doesn’t make it back to my eye off the surface. I seek the dry place on my skin where water retracted to form a perfect droplet elsewhere.

I would like to befriend the silences in life before experiencing the silence of death.

In Wordy Wordiness,

Walter