The Muted Colors of Antique Soundscapes
In college I had this ongoing joke with a girl I shared a couple of writing workshops with. My pieces, they were always wordy and introspective. I liked the technique of telling about a half-page’s worth of action, then expounding on it for next 3, analyzing it, exaggerating it. Action, commentary, action, action, commentary–that structure didn’t do it for me. I wanted 90% commentary–all commentary. How else could I really get at the double consciousness thing I was going for? The idea that everything is two-sided, love and hate, rational and irrational, emotion and logic, and that each side is fully aware of the other. How else than to make my lusts into obsessions and my doubts into pure dreads could I really nail it? I think what I was going for most was avoiding definition. I didn’t want my characters to come to revelations; no epiphanies or morals; I didn’t want arcs to peak and then resolve. I wanted something a little more… blah. Something blurry and real.
Anyway, the joke, if you want to call it that, was that this girl would call me a romantic after each new piece of mine she read. And I’d laugh and look down and say, “No… What? No way. A cynic–if anything–but not a romantic.” And this was our thing. She’d smirk, say that it was sweet, and I’d blush, and say she didn’t get it.
What’s funny in all this is just how quickly after graduation I began to see things differently. Yeah, okay, I am a romantic. And yes, I’m also a cynic. It was the whole idea of everything I was writing at the time–the one theme I kept coming back to and trying to get right–and I was never even able to just admit this to myself, as if the word alone–”romantic”–made me into a sucker, naive or pathetic somehow. I still thought of “jadedness” as a badge that you wear or a mark of maturity, instead of a disease, a cancer you treat in stages. It defines you the same that it means absolutely nothing. It is possible to love and lose, and then be angry, and then be messed up for long time, and still one day get out of the shower, look yourself in the mirror and understand that the fog around you isn’t all heavy or all light but rather a million shades and slivers of everything, some parts cold and others warm, some sharp, others soft. If we do it right, the fog should be a crowded, directionless mist of honesty, not necessarily changing our reflection, just aging it a bit.
So I guess the best way to introduce this poem would be to say that it’s from before this “revelation,” if you want to call it that, happened. It’s still searching for extremes, in a way yearning for them, but it’s detached and aware enough to get that they only exist now in flashes–just not enough so to totally accept that. …I think.
This one’s from March 26, 2009. It’s called “Antique Soundscapes.”
Antique Soundscapes
A record spins on a turntable,
pouring the most delicate music
into the soundless sky below my ceiling—
where everything is, where my thoughts are,
where your exhausted ghost is,
growing as tired of holding onto me
as I am of carrying it.
But this song
reminds me of you.
In its static I hear your whisper, floating
over me like smoke, a gentle kiss on the neck,
leaning in like a secret
and saying: “Somewhere,
maybe only in dreams, I still love you.
We’re still the sky
and music
and all things soft and beautiful.
Close your eyes. Drift away with me….”
But now dust greys the cover
like a stale morning dew
and this room is too small, its ceilings too low
to fit any more sound inside.
Not even a hum could squeeze through this fragile air,
not without tearing it.
So I move closer to the spinning sound,
closer to the scratching,
and hold my hands before it feeling for your flame,
feeling for anything
in it that might burn like warmth.
We’re in there somewhere,
in the somewhere that static goes when the music’s over.
We’re the anti-silence of a record’s end,
the way it cries and crackles,
spinning on long after the melody has faded—
and never fast enough to make a fire.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 6:02 pm and is filed under poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
