Column of Silence
Homage to childhood gods, signs that were changes
in the sky and under foot, who promised me
360 degrees from the top of the apple tree,
or quiet at the creek to hear in marsh hisses
whispers, or to follow, steps behind, traces
unnamed until in lessons they took trait and shape.
Years later, in Greece, at sites of broken stones,
I walked devout everywhere, and strained
in the hot sun to name each stone, each shift
in thought tracked in the small print of the Guide.
Too much! First the knees bloated and stiffened,
then the eyes shut down to reject uniqueness.
To defeat - ideas. The history of Western thought
reduced to the desire for an awning and iced tea.
No more "Is this where...?" "In what year....?"
Only sit in the plaza cafe, alone, like the column
of silence carved by a hand that no longer matters
and hear in the shade uncontrollable voices - cicadas? -
swell like a wave of scrolled moldings or the zigzags
of frizzed hair in the beautiful beard of the god,
frame to planes and hollow eyes that must have been black,
that must have twinkled before chiseled in stone -
flow over the arms of the young bride, along tucks
at the breasts and the fluted hem of her chiton
as she takes from her jewelry case a bracelet,
almost to clasp it around her wrist, almost to rise -
glide forward, a snake's bronze flux on an arm,
its head up, its tongue flicking, sloe eye rude -
sing in the taut string on the bows of the archers
kneeling in rows, while hot stars churn the day sky -
roar forth from the arched neck of the bull whose horns
rise in a gold undulation twisted with petaled rosettes
to praise in grace notes the somersault over time -
its animal smell, its pain, its force - but above that
to pour out into the silence of the midday street
of flecks of dust and leaf and powdery lime
an ode to the birth of form and sign
out of the clash of matter with the meandering mind.
– joyce nower
"Column of Silence," was first published in a limited edition chapbook, Column of Silence, Avranches Press (Aptos, CA, 2001)