Slow Transparency

By: Rachel Hadas

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Synopsis: Here is a bit of "Praise for a Patch of Quiet:" Two of the strongest silences to lean on: a white cat lying on a wooden floor waking to stretch and stretching back to sleep (cream walls, grey-painted floorboards, plain white curtains, black metronome) and out of doors where all the world's a timepiece this slope of ripening or ripened apples. Their floating tart perfumes do not insist to one whose only hunger is for quiet this afternoon; they just enrich the air, invisibly adorn one's breathing space. Spaces between first words, then conversations: the tempo slows. Rust holes at first glinted like isolate stars in the tin barn roof years have dappled since to slow transparency. I'd thought to be alone would be . . . would be . . . bees buzzed a busy swarm, each mote a menace. Would be to lose a writing hand, a face, a sounding board, a listening ear, a voice-- all lopped imaginings. WTould be and was and is this afternoon to lose the need for ticktock voicing. Silence thickens: mercury gleams afresh in the cherished tarnished mirror I tilt, across whose valuable sheen as over clean white paper half a dozen summer pencils lightly scribble: insect buzz, chainsaw, birdcall, hoot of train, pattern simple at once and multiple as are the endless changes of attention due to a single hour of cloudboats sailing across and across a shifting summer sky. ...