October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Silence requires effort, an effort to give mystical language a musical intelligence. We’ll go bathe in the Hungarian woods where there are unisons in the branches. We are one thing the cosmos is doing in the heat and solidity of this moment. All sentences end, and you can’t stop the clock, not even for Heather. Shall I write this down, that I have thought of trying to hammer words into posterity, enchantments of rhythm and your nearness, a root sound, a detonation in song, a penny falling from the clouds? How black and Protestant is my autumn–moving, intrinsically Cherokee.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
The silence of the snow is as mystical as our daughter, who lives for the woods and her words and sentences. Her voice is a lyre. She lives in each sentence and has found the rhythm of rivers, perhaps even the sound of butterflies, those very children of heaven that crown a meadow’s greenery. Sound off now, every corner of nature, for her–Cassie. Who has painted. The entire forest. With touches and smiles. Create glittering music every morning to soothe the troubles that bury us in treble-tarnish. Sit with me at the edge where heat is concealed, Cassandra.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Torrential–in the branches–time comes down, and Sibyl can’t stop the clock. Every word that Heather speaks she wants to hear before leaving the world. Nothingness enchants nothing. Show her the roots of your sound, Heather. Let your dense coronation ring–go to the sundial and redial it, find sundown’s second down. Enter with your heart’s chords the universal orchard universal in violet. Something is blackening over the rainbow, perhaps it is a rock fracture in the mountains. And so you will hate to listen to the blood’s sea-shadow. You run away to sea and I to tea.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Sibyl I do remember when your heart was concealed and your blood glittered through my constitution as each evening broke down. And I am listening for new music from your snow-white imagination, strength-giving and searing. Tell me anything but farewell, let us not indulge in violence, reach to me out of the dust that underscores the aria at my stylus. Oh, deadly water-shadows, there is a spider in the night sky when I only want to place a hot chocolate cup in the hand of Sibyl. Hold it steadily now, Sibyl; in deepest old age, with trembling.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Sibyl right now has this plan. It requires her to watch the clocktower. She is expecting Heather to arrive. What was that scratching sound at the door this morning? She will sell off her jewelry to stay in New York for another week. At Carnegie Hall, she saw keyboards bathed in floodlight. What an imagination you have, Sibyl! I must see you again. Your heritage is no more solid than the chimes that strike in the clocktower, and these poems are my own chords struck off at odd angles. Could we not hold hands once more under blue winter chimes?
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Sibyl and Heather (shall I write this?) are speaking the same language these days. They live in each other’s homes and, to be concise, never get out of the same bed. They dance enchantingly there, stopping at nothing, slam-dancing under the sheets. Some days the natural universe is completely mysterious. Autumn is ripping a lot of vegetation out of my city just as I speak. I will hold with the density of her thoughts and the mirth belonging to my utterly full pool of spring water which she is. Sibyl, whom I shall see again before this century’s out.
