Music is the Sound Between II
After half a lifetime of holding my ear to trees trying to hear the music, after you died everywhere I
went the Earth-harp insisted on plucking its own strings. I heard the music everywhere—
in water striking metal drain,
the trumpet of wet foot sliding across tile.
The drumroll rattling the trash can on its way to the curb.
It was out there all along
as the space between the gasps
of it finally being over. Maybe it’s true
that I’ve never understood music.
If there was a secret chord
would I even hear it?
If music is the sound between the notes, then what separates music from silence?
How close must be the distance between notes to qualify? Milliseconds?
Millions of years?
That quiet between the rumblings of thunder
roiling across prairie sky, the rumblings
of a disquiet mind,
the particular summer sounds
of urban spaces muffled
between blankets of smog
that drown out
the smooth untangled line of the horizon.
The silent spaces
I begin to know as safety
that tuned my ears to music.
Somewhere in the torn slips of silence, maybe there is room
to find some mathematical algorithms
a magic capable of reducing life into art,
capable of storing the memories
alchemizing pain into art—
whatever it is that makes life echo
in the thing called silence:
(noun) an empty substrate in a constant state of waiting for an interruption in order to finally sing
i.e. make that thing called music.
In this forest there is the silence between birdsong / the space between raindrops / the fractions of
quiet between flaps of hummingbird wing. In these spaces, I think I’m finally beginning to hear
something. It might be my inner metronome simply keeping time between the pauses in that tempo.
I may hear the music in it
I may hear
the grass growing as it crashes through the earth.
