The Poetry of Quietude

 

28 May 2022

“We were good. We were good. We stayed quiet.” Even the child hit on the nose by a bullet remained quiet, as did the teacher, bleeding from her leg. The ones who could be seen played dead; the others prayed. What makes them prey, these innocents? He wanted to be close to them, his mother said. When one girl said “help,” he shot her. The intimacy of a bullet wound. I could not bear the thought of intimacy until the wound closed, a bit. Rape by bullet a false intimacy, sick in its equation of blood not with relation but with its breaking. Blood is metaphor, except when it’s spilled.

You are either abandoned or lucky, there’s no middle position. You are either left or you are right. “I have to put L on my left hand, and R on my right,” she tells me, to tell them apart. My mother played cards left-handed, though she gave that up before I arrived. We want one or the other, because the middle confuses us. So blame the shooting on a door, blame it on anti-depressants, blame it on evil, blame it on the mother who failed to take her daughter home that day. She blames herself. Leave Moloch out of it.

Moloch Moloch Moloch. He is never quiet, demands us like our big cat, yelling to be let out, then in, then out. My silence feels passive; I am trapped in the corner of our sickness, unable to speak it. The coach pounds a table. “Those are just words,” a neighbor says. We want words to matter. The former president reads the names of the dead while a bell tolls. He cannot pronounce most names. (Names are words, I see someone write.) Then he does a jig on stage. Another successful NRA convention.

A second cat comes to sniff the chair on which a third cat had slept. She is utterly quiet, even as her nose moves. I sit on the floor typing, while the dog sleeps. Our silence is under threat from birds, from traffic, from the man coughing upstairs. Which way do you run, when the shooting starts?

“I don’t want any more moments of silence,” he says. Can there not be outrage in such quiet, between the storms. We know the next one comes, because murder is a weather pattern. Hope the wind turns the other way so you can breathe, then worry when it stops. When our memories melt like sand, make glass. To see brings us close. To see through keeps us quiet. Someone look inside the windows of that classroom and take it all back.

The war diary has moved home. War photographs give way to those of small children holding their honors certificates and smiling. That was before. After, we write about the silence, if not inside of it. If you can count to ten, you can breathe for them. If you breathe for them, won’t they come home again?

Where the palm was cut, I found the image of an outer space creature, wings flung out from its orange face, a yellow collar composing the image for me. If you look close enough, nothing pretends to make sense.