Breath and Air
for Sierra
Certain quiets reach deeper than hearing.
They exist, say, in small dim rooms,
in hospital wings shuttered from the sun:
in a small dim room where a crowd has drawn
round a bed with metal frame, round a figure
in bed, with the hair you knew all sheared away,
with the macerations of a merciless pavement
like clouds of rage across her cheeks and brow.
The half-light whispers with a wind of little noises:
snufflings, stirrings, sudden private gasps
of bewilderment and anguish
and the metric, mechanized, hiss and sigh
of the ventilator that hides her lips from sight
and billows her lungs with an air that is not breathing.
***
A cramped room far from silent
but herein a greater quiet pervades:
in the space over the eyes of the dead;
in the interstice between the pulse of the machines;
in the poise of her grandmother hunched at the bedside
counting in a daze the girl’s chipped unfeeling toes,
like an old maid in a fable
condemned to some absurd, infernal numbering.
In the gaps that demarcate our heartbeats.
In the hush of the ventilator’s pumps at rest.
It seems to take hold of you when you’re there with it,
this quiet,
not as in anger, with fists, by the scruff of the collar,
but as one seeking to command notice:
seizing you by the arms, the shoulders,
entreating gently:
Be still.
Certain quiets reach deeper than hearing.
They speak to us in a place older than language,
where you listen not with your ears
but your heart and skin. Death
must hum at his loom, the way
people sometimes do when engaged
in tasks familiar or perfunctory,
or acts that bring joy but require patience,
patience,
patience.
After the switch is thrown,
after the sorrowing,
after the body is lifted from its pillowed bed
and by clinical hands transferred
to the gurney of its last repose—
as beneath a dimpled sheet she’s wheeled
down a corridor flanked by witnesses,
through a brace of swinging doors
into another room, another room,
small, with a drain in the floor—
the quiet of her passage before those watching ranks
blossoms through the air, fills
the tear-brimmed eyes like
the waiting after a thunderclap:
the voice of a thing felt but never heard.
.
Annapurna Dreams
for Mary
In my dreams I’m dancing with Parvati, in moonbeams, in mountains, in a kingdom in the snow. Ice pinnacles like higher beacons shine against the cold rush of stars streaking through the blue-black sky, quaking, these mountains will never crumble. All the universe sings inside us, she is laughing, the Pleiades roar across her eternal skin. Sun and moon are ringing through my head, ringing in the snow; we are like phosphor crystals ignited by the rotation of this swift and singing world, this singing void, these singing lights. We run, we dance, these mountains will never crumble. All creation resounds around us, like a bell, a decaying atom, this dreaming kingdom, there are snow leopards playing in the scree. In my dreams we rise above the clarion glacier peaks, beyond the sky, where all is burning; Parvati’s palace falls away and we rise higher; we sing, we sing as we burn—dissolve in webs of sacred fire—streak into nothingness like memory or echo—to join again the ringing stars, the ringing ice, the unbound sea. Between the light and the star we fly. These mountains will never crumble.
© M.P. Strayer
M.P. Strayer‘s work has appeared in numerous publications, most recently Aethlon: the Journal of Sports Literature, Carmina Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon.
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