Neptune
Interpreting the World
by Richard LeDue
The earth hums and whistles
amidst the darkness of space
and cliched ideas like,
“No one can hear you scream.”
Our planet might just be
amusing itself,
although some say it’s more
like a bell vibrating,
and other planets make noises too,
so maybe this is all a celestial conversation
we’re not supposed to understand.
Then again, perhaps it’s all a warning:
the start of our ending,
when silence will equal sound
because there’s no one left to listen,
or to those more hopeful,
it could be our beginning-
a harmonious song
we call humanity.
The Space Between All Things
by John Laue
There was, about the waterfront that day,
a humming like a faraway music,
a drone, as in a raga, also overtones
almost eclipsed by crashing of the surf,
but appearing to grow louder
so they could be heard above that din.
I wondered if my ears were ringing
or if I heard a higher music,
the universe’s fundamental harmony.
Was it calling out to me?
Had I labored all my life for this
and now approached finality?
I found my end hard to conceive
unless it was this humming
growing louder, more insistent,
till it drowned out every other sound,
till I thought it might be generated
by windy revolutions of the earth,
or emanate from great, gaseous spaces
that contain the stars and planets.
I knew whatever fate awaited me
was exactly as it should be,
so I lay as in a casket,
closed my eyes and slept.
I dreamt of freedom in a space
so big I found it difficult to conceive.
In that drowse, no room was large enough:
I wasn’t bounded by sheer walls,
or doors, or personal gravity:
I was pure spirit, flying everywhere.
I thought perhaps our truest nature
was to be free as gases, fast as light,
in rhythm with the universe.
When I woke from that deep reverie,
I’d found a kind of peace,
a satisfaction with my going.
I still hear music to this day,
heights and depths are easier for me,
widths and breadths not only what they seem.
All distinctions we so carefully draw
seem blurry, half-invisible
horizon lines at sea in rain.
Creation, recreation, dissolution,
birth and death are merely grace notes,
sub tones of a grand symphonic wail
to which we each must move,
greater than a million human bands—
call it spirit if you will.
We stay, we go, they’re not identical,
but parts of what we are:
small pieces of an infinite whole.
If this universe expands
there’s room for us to grow.
There’s no set limit; no firm law.
So today when I imagine death
what I really hear and feel is music.
That’s how we change–from dance to dance.
Leak in the Mask
by John Grey
Thought is the riverbank,
anxiety, the rushing current.
Drowning man can’t get
to the safety of his mind,
grabs at his hallucinations.
kicks at his luxurious memory.
He’s going under in the watery flames,
the tumult o f a withering brain storm.
Ideas can’t spin their satellites
through his flooded hemispheres.
His body is a cripple
struggling to clamber up
on the rungs of disappearing function.
Nothing matters but
the crushing of the lung.
Only his tattoos can dream.
Drowning man embraces the unreal.
expands into the chloroform
of all-absolving death.
He’s a planet trying to lasso into orbit.
a meteorite striking the landscape
of himself.
Look up in the sky,
see bear and archer, shimmering lion.
But see drowning man
pulled under by the cosmos.
See drowning man
bouncing off the metal of his ship.
fragments of death
sucked up by life’s sleek magnets.
Whale Song from the Corners of Eternity
I’ve learned more through my ears than my eyes. I remember a college music class with images of yellow-robed priests’ on the ground holding their heads while music oozed out their ears. Musicologists’ believe those priests – Incan, Mayan, or Egyptian – were smitten by ecstatic sound, a pure mystical tone driving them into muted dust in awe and submission.
The world is made and unmade in the vibrations of sound. Our lives are made of vibrations heard or unheard, a fact poets knew and voiced long before quantum thought.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes play on
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone
While training in Hawaii to free dive, my teacher offered advice, “Swim like liquid through liquid.” Later that day, I buckled-up a weight-belt and descended to 60 feet where sleepy-eyed dolphins close enough to touch, glided past. Their slow clicks and sonic vibrations guided every arc of fin and tail. Their sweeter melodies were unheard by me.
I recognized pieces of their sound, something like a muted trombone on jazz. I hummed, dolphins twisted, and all three of my inner minds buzzed on high alert and low oxygen. I wanted to change colors with the octopus, I wanted to trim downward, I wanted to stay, but my lungs screamed for air. I rose.
Miles out, the humpbacks sang. I gulped air and went down again – not as deep the second time. My cochlea caught their stereo sound and humpback aria rearranged maps in my head; the ecstatic tumbled out of my ears as sonic clicks and squeals of dolphin acoustihoo melded with whale-song, both entering and jangling ‘round my skull, sparking brain cells and synapses.
The whale-song’s mystery struck its crescendo, most of it unheard. Some of it came to me as a gentle call from deep in the Pacific; its vibration “more intelligent than intellect, and more spiritual than spirit,” capable of making priests’ wallow in dust and seekers swim out of their minds. Humpback acoustihoo has remained deep in my body where sacred sounds reside.
“ …a feeling of awful peace and quiet came
over me. For a long time, then, it was as if I had happened into
the nearest corner of eternity.”
Star Song
by Carol Casey
Do the stars sing?
Do the planets talk to each other
each with their own voice,
but able to harmonize
in a celestial choir?
Do celestial bodies touch
each other through song,
learning, growing, becoming,
in ways beyond my knowing-
more vital, more real?
What does earth sing about?
Waves lapping, leaves unfurling,
glaciers dancing, elephants dying?
Does she sing of the parasite?
Or are we, in the end, inconsequential
to her melody?
Is each star-song a gateway
to some wild sacred that calls
to the particles of stars within me;
answers questions I don’t know to ask;
invites me to find the notes,
deep-buried in my molecules
to sing this one, this only time?
The Brahman
by Velibor Baćo
That which is not uttered by speech,
that by which the word is expressed,
that which one does not think with the mind,
that by which the mind is thought,
that which one does not see with the eye,
that which is the seer of the eye,
that which one does not hear with the ear,
that by which one hears the ear’s hearing.
That Brahman is known by those who,
look upon all things alike,
above all contraries,
devoid of doubt,
free of illusion,
not this,
not that.
The sound of clapping with one hand,
eternal humming,
the begin of all beginnings,
the end of all ending.
Springchill
by Kate Meyer
Winter was stuck in an icy
Groove: death-metal tracks
On repeat for head-banging
Frost-giants, endless Viking
War-ballads of grey shores,
Departing ships and keening
Maidens, bereft on stony
Beaches while their men sailed
Off to war. Spring has its own
Playlist to showcase; the song
Of birds, that breaks with the
Dawn, a chorus in tune with
The rising sun and longer days,
Whose clear notes drive out
The bass-beat of the dark.
2020_39
by Jeremy Szuder
Where I Go
by Isabella Melians
umbrella ceilings
falling down, down like Alice:
to join the rabbits
raze these carbon bonds,
scientists never told us
that cacti can blink
burning, oozing clocks;
surrealists knew more lies than
the oldest oak tree
champagne giggles crawl
across linoleum tiles
with soot-stained kneecaps
metamorphosize
god’s guardian grasshoppers:
nuns never prayed more