Poet Robert Hilles' poem: Noise Rises from Partake published 2010 by Black Moss Press.
Here is my video reading of it: http://www.yo utube.com/watch?v=j1XvgsCzjfI
My YouTube Channel with more readings is at: http://www.youtube.com/users/hillesr
My website with many more poems is at: http://roberthilles.wordpress.com/
Noise Rises
A few hours after his death
We sat in a bar in Vancouver
Drinking wine and talking about my brother
As I felt his worldly absence for the first time.
A heavy west coast downpour
Had soaked us in the short walk
From our hotel to the bar.
All wet like that
We drank to my brother's memory
While the TV flickered with bigger news.
Months later in Chiang Mai
Sometimes at night I lie awake
As noises rise up from the street below
The drum and bass line from Thai rock
A motorcycle revs past
A man shouts something in Thai
And I think of how my brother's body
Changed those final months
He spoke of it sometimes but
The cancer took his voice too.
We can make bodies out of music
And street noise but they are never the bodies
We are in search of
But new bodies
Come to take the place of others
And noise begets noise
The city a hive of it
Nothing quiets it
Today I am thankful
To be amongst that noise.
All I can think of are random images
A horse coming up a hill
And then later
A dead bear on the highway
A rubber tire
A broken leg
Let the wind take it
My brother is the noise rising up
From the streets of Chiang Mai
All of it swollen into his shape
That sound now
That drumbeat
That is his heart
Slowing down and then stopping.
