“Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: it is heard in terms of time length” John Cage
“If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence” Middlemarch, George Eliot.
Try to take a ruler to the weather
Luke Howard enters with rain gauge to plot
species extinction as the clouds amass
blood caught in the throes of moon, fire and flood
as if held in the soft curls of cursive
hair where all relates to each web in this.
Yoko Ono thinks of drilling two holes
to hang where sky is still seen. Cumulus
visions in the splatometer of past
marks on windscreens: a child running with nets
on a beach. Plastic mesh among butterflies
where ring pull blades grow in dunes, sandy
with long dead creatures. Tracks of flight, flicker
across Bull’s Spark Drum Camera that records
a lack of attention to that roar -
on the other side. Lives going on any
which way, backgrounded, surprised by this drop
boom of ice core, heartbeats solarise unheard.
