Golden Saucers: whisking silence

Golden Saucers: whisking silence

On the fuzzy periphery of a weekday afternoon, a phone rings but once a day. It’s mom calling from the driveway who “could use some help” with the groceries. Occasionally a text will jolt the stillness with a zap back to where good friends are studying, interning, teaching, traveling, wedding, birthing, drinking, laughing, fighting, earning, living for . . .

the crystal-tinkling clarity of some unadulterated sound.

Save for the seldom awakening of the grad-gift phone, my sounds these days are frequently cupped silence, filled with the memory of amniotic fluidity. When the sun rays reach into my childhood window and are particularly beckoning with their gentle invitation to join the world, I drive to a cabin once filled with second cousins and aunts and toddlers spilling out every straining window screen to the patio undergrowth of frog racing, fireflying, citronella wafting, and boat motors whining for just 10 more minutes, please, in the water.

The water is calm. My phone has no bars, and I, this time, am silently alone. Floating. Rocking. Irrevocably lulled.

My brain, too, is silent, the disquiet of the neuron map for now stowed away, washed ashore to make way for the expansive emptiness of the 3:00 sky.

Allow a cloud-flood through the retinas, through to the brain. In the sun-washed silence, absence, four tablespoons of softened butter must be what a baby feels when it first surmises the sky.

Let the brain stem keep inching back till the chin passes above the horizon line of trees, toes disappear, no cheating, feel the heavy cranium stretch back, ahh, all the way.

Clouds, the silent movie that speaks with a breath of originality, of change, whisk and scramble with each blink.

In a lull of blinking silence, I rediscovered clouds.