Writing of the Creative Kind

One cannot reason with silence. And the library was deathly ill with it that evening.

Librarians are 21st century social workers; their case load this evening was particularly plush.

Bill Withers. Nina Simone. Robert Johnson. Herman Melville. Sylvia Plath. Aldous Huxley.

The city air moved sedentary objects in spasms outside the nearest window; books did the same to the drug addict seated in the farthest chair.

She was having trouble concentrating and her own spasms belied this: legs twitching, heart burning, fingers twisting.

One cannot reason with silence.

There had been an incident at the stable; Martha wasn’t able to move her 80 year old joints in time, and her face and neck had suffered dearly for it. Fractures. Contusions.

So, in actuality, far more square footage was affected by this illness. Silence had swept across her terrain.

And when the spasms stopped, all movement was utterly suspended. Impulses were denied. Desires atrophied.

One cannot reason with silence.

Again and again she had watched tragedy, both minor and catastrophic, cloak her surroundings. Time and Time again she had picked up the remains and moved forward. 

Every time the same. This time, however, was different. This time she could claim no hand in the carnage. This time she could claim no hand in the recovery.

To endure this immobility, she went to the library–the last bastion of promulgated silence. To be its ally. 

Because one cannot reason with silence.

Her eyes disconcert their brown. This the first indication, a

readiness to engage, obvious intelligence, which, combined with her complexion,   

heightens the factory noise.

Fan blades strobe the light in the rafters. 

By concentrating I can hear 

my own voice, a reminder

to be serious. 

She stands loose-jointed not really listening. 

Safety regs. 

OSHA. 

Comp.

I feel myself slow down

Her nametag’s obliterated 

by oil, hair pulled under 

her hat. Despite coveralls, 

I can trace the shape of her body.  

The body expresses an idea of the shape of the person inside.  

Dominic the semi-retard beside 

her has been injured twice. First 

by a flat of iron that fell off 

some forks near the dock, second 

when he let his finger stray 

into the shear-press.  Less 

than 600 dollars sick 

pay and it couldn’t 

be reattached.

For a moment she seems to acknowledge me.

It’s like watching sheetglass collapse.  

There are lights on right now in rooms where loved ones no longer live; there is movement that traces the spectral recesses of past movements. But those halls don’t whistle and moan like they once did; the air is permeated with a distinctly new effervescence. 

We pull and we break. Our tidewaters recede in a process that’s forgotten to pair a flow to its ebb. We stop and stare at open doors and unencumbered passageways with incredulous immobility, yet practically impale ourselves on the victorian knockers of the doors that are closed to us–we make ourselves the battering rams, we choose the presence of a foe.

Regardless of clutter, regardless of the vain attempts to occupy every bit of space around me in order to keep something unquantifiable at bay, I found myself mired in it. Things had surrounded me; people had abandoned me; regrets accumulated. The price of these insulating materials had gone up, driven by speculation and pivoting on a recessed market that inspired nothing; frequently undue panic became the harbinger of all the uncontrolled elements that existed around me–the very plasmatic particles that built the air through which I waded.

I foresaw nothing and began to want less, which was the key to surviving this tainted fray, this dishonorable fracas. Who I was didn’t translate well to the dailies, so I concocted a Self that did. I was thorough in my transformation.

Even when Lem’s thugs dragged Jones from the forest

I didn’t believe him dead. His long body, meat now,

and in that heat swollen by dusk. The garish epaulettes, 

the ridiculous sash, gone.

Not even boots. That’s it then, I thought, 

no gunboat to Martinique.

Some mornings I’d find him on the terrace, rambling. 

That Irishman, he would say, just wrote it; I 

am the Emperor Jones. He drank and shouted parts from MacBeth,

threw bottles at the boy, demanded we play dice. How 

he loathed my white skin. 

In his wicker chair, dripping sweat, 

he told me I was a ghost.

In a Water Street pub a rummy named Walters reported Jones had survived.

He left the island on a tramp for Havana and was sighted in New York

on a streetcar or in an opium den.

I didn’t know what to believe. 

Then Walters remarked the Irishman.

A tall man who coughed as he drank brandy-soda

bragged in a bar he owned Brutus Jones.

‘I made that black bastard a king,’ he said

just before he walked out.

I left the island a fortnight after the Americans landed. 

They quickly disarmed Lem’s army

though it is said his nephews escaped.

Boarding the launch I saw 

a line of natives strung 

together with rope, waiting 

while a marine 

issued them shovels and picks.

In a doorway, a woman

bobbed, 

tucking a child behind her skirt. 

The barefoot policeman rested,

next to a wagon of ice.