Van der Leun

Into the Silence

The last sound heard before the silence
Settled on my flesh in wisps,
Was the shriek of frozen ambulances
Wrapped in sharp, revolving red.
Then the holes in my skull sealed shut,
And on my tongue I heard the tang of brass.

At first a ringing whine rose high and faded far,
Then bells began, each dim and laced with smoke,
And merged with walls of wind upon crisp water,
Blooming high in white, white only, drifts
Of softly falling snow falling softly
Until they blurred the shapes of sound and speech.

The memory remained awhile, and moving lips
Became the shapes of sound I could not see
To read, and all my mind filled not with silence
But with dark brushed on deeper dark
Within which all stars died, and dying gave
A single bloom of sound beyond all song.

It moaned and chittered, groaned and sighed.
It grinned as one at me, inscrutable and blank,
As shells evicted by the sea are spurned
By waves and parch above the dampened sands,
To be polished first by dust, then honed by rain,
Into a whitened replica of stone.

Made new, I loved large gestures,
Marking furrowed face and curl of lip.
I memorized the signing hands that stripped
My half-guessed comprehension bare,
And learned at last to wait upon a glance,
Upon small words quickly scratched on slate.

As days to years enlarged their rule,
All records writ within my skull were smudged,
And songs and music drifted off to send
Pale emblems of their realms as tribute
To the stone that once had formed a throne
Strung with unsensed pleasures shrugged.

All that treasure spent, all gems corroded now,
All metals melded into dust, all trace of walls
Where once the filigreed firebird sang,
And drums of heroes' skins were stunned,
Were but shadows strewn as features faint
As lines of light on planets seen from space.

And then with time all that too -- erased,
And sands and seas swarmed over all,
And ruled at last alone a world of frost,
Of ice, of snow, of sheaves of glass,
Until along the farthest strip of polished shore
One distant crystal glinted, gleamed and chimed.

Pure Mathematics

I.

Titanium skaters on lakes of metallic hydrogen
Strew constant curves of crystalline
Isotopes of orange uranium
All about the vacant house.

Enigmas of equations
Slide lattices to rest
In beds of powdered strontium,
Molding energy as form suggests.

In the place of flux we find new forms,
For flux-formed spaces enfold
The charms of magnet's fever
Which conduct the core from pole to pole.

II.

The whiteness of Earth's silence
Is an eye that stares on space.
Orbits chart it ceaselessly,
Etching paradigms of lace.

The inner of Earth's outer
Is a torus twisted twice.
Balloons ascend within it
Painting shadows in the room.

III.

What can the mind of silence hear
Other than a whiteness past recall?
It evolves from our epicenters,
Stretches measureless as sound,
Or is seen as the floor of the void
Where the whine of protons stills
In the drifts of chromium snow,
and gazes on the bones of matter bare.
At times, men in aluminum cloaks
Descend the neutron ladder,
And move in a sleet of particles
Too scintillating for instruments to record.
At times, men in groups descend
Through the smoke of the universe,
To tend the embers, imprison flame.
Their cascading dance sparkles.
We taste the afterimage of events.
Below us, pale and infinitely silent,
The plutonium leaves arabesque
Through radiant silences of solid helium.

IV.

Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths
closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising
from the surface of the pools.

Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and, tapping faintly on the rock,
revealed the edges of the chamber.

Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains,
speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time,
I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm,
as if I had just woken from all water into dream.