Jorie Graham

In/Silence

I try to hold my lie in mind.
My thinking one thing while feeling another.
My being forced. Because the truth
is a thing one is not permitted to say.
That it is reserved for silence,
a buttress in silence's flyings, its motions
always away from source; that it is re-
served for going too, for a deeply
artifactual spidery form, and how it can, gleaming,
yet looking still like mere open air, mere light,
catch in its syntax the necessary sacrifice.
Oh whatever that might be. How for song
I looked today long and hard at a singing bird,
small as my hand, inches from me, seeming
to puff out and hold something within, something that
                                            makes
wind ruffle his exterior more--watched
him lift and twist a beak sunlight made burnt-silver
as he tossed it back--not so much to let
anything out but more to carve and then to place firmly in the
                                            listening space
                                            around him
a piece of inwardness: no visible
passaging-through: no inner complication and release:
no passage from an inner place--a mechanism
of strings, bone, hollow
chamber--no native immaterial quiver time turns material--
then towards [by mechanisms ancient and invisible] expression,
and the tragic of all upward motion--
then it all lost in the going aloft with the as yet
                                 unsung--then
the betrayal (into the clear morning air)
of the source of happiness into mere (sung) happiness.
Although there is between the two, just at the break
of silentness, a hovering, almost a penitent
                        hesitation, an
intake, naked, before any dazzling release
of the unfree into the seeming free, and it seems
it goes elsewhere, and the near (the engine) overruns
into the truly free. This till the last stars be counted?
This plus the mind's insistent coming back and coming back?
This up against that coming back. The death of
uncertainty. The song that falls upon the listener's eye,
that seeks the sleek minimum of the meaningless made.
Here in the morning light. In matter's massive/muscular/venerable holding-in
of all this flow. Next door the roses flow.
Blood in the hand that reaches for them flows.

---

Jorie Graham is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field (Selected Poems 1974-1994) which won the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Harvard University. contents | previous