Walls

Walls of solidified sound…

the bricks memories of a lifetime’s noise stacked too high to see over; striated blocks of songs and voices, of lorries on wet night roads, cries and pleas and ignored entreaties; brown waves rolling shingle; crackling cellophane, cities – traffic, telephones and typewriters – the wind in gutters and the jets whistling over the river, descending; music and hubbub; ringing and rain; engines; sweet words never truly believed; radio voices, chanting crowds, Hollywood gunfire and squealing tyres; unceasing chatter, instructions, threats, jokes, laughter, complaint, the endless goodbyes; the scratch of a pen and the cry of gulls

sound...sound…

Walls of solidified sound enfold a garden of spikes, dry and dusty, Spanish; the exercise yard of a prison; a crouching space bounded by fossilised noise.

This must be written down, he had thought on the edge of sleep, slipping into the velvet; this demands a table in midnight lamplight, a table with an ashtray. I am being told something. It would be disrespectful not to write it down. It is the soul of the Word made solid in bricks of sound, each one a whispering block of time, a lost place. There was never stillness, never a pause – there was only sound, sound chased, sound to fill the silence of lonely fear.

Mute books in rows on blue shelves. The face of a mask. Hush, says the mask, mouth closed, eyes empty holes showing the blank wall behind. Behind me and before me is silence: cultivate silence, enter silence, embrace silence. Let the whispered words swarm up through a soup of silence. Hear the silent night.

I feel her. The Lady speaks, and her voice is silence. She looks to me without eyes.