Silence is the most beautiful myth.
They have given it golden Gods, sculptures of Ptolemaic bronze, those temporary men—
Children with fingers held to their stone lips,
Sparrow-hawks who typify
Winter’s white, dispassionate sun.
And we, we have tried to give it truth—
“The room was as silent
As death, as thought,
As this city night, as the stone-cold lips of
Isis’s son, Harpocrates.”
We have tried
To give it definition.
But is death ever really silent, is thought?
The city you love, new and exciting in velvet dusk—
Does it not breathe?
Its lungs are cracks in concrete, and when literary men sleep,
They heave.
Slowly, deeply, in and out and in again, its breaths match ours,
And become the drunken buzz that drones in the ears when
One spends the night among bitter lights and bitterer cold.
Harpocrates, he was not always the Greek god of silence:
He was once the Egyptian god of childhood,
And what is noisier than childhood?
Than one-pound sweetie-shops and crayons on white walls and
Finger-stained fish-tanks and newborn kittens by the tens and
Toys that walk and squawk and murmur and wail?
There will never be silence.
Our devices hum, our brains scream,
Our dead turn, our cities breathe,
Our children play,
And our gods remain carved into history’s corroded bronze,
Misunderstood by temporary men, by temporary art.
There will never be silence, and
That is why it is the most beautiful myth:
It is a reflection of a stillborn thing
Preserved in a pickle jar;
It is a reflection of a dead thing
Killed by literary, temporary,
Blood-spattered
Men.
(There will never be silence, and
That is why it is the most beautiful myth:
We wish it was.)
