July/August 2018: Poetry

Homage to John Cage

Silence is so accurate. —Mark Rothko

 Light through vaulted windows, the shadows

of elms in wind. On stage, the pianist,

hands in his lap. Still. The shadows

strumming his face, his hands. Four minutes

and thirty-three seconds of silence

so you may hear the music

of conditioned air through vents,

rustling clothes, the muffled echo

of shoes shuffling, all the sounds

the orchestra of chance performs.

The whole world is an auditorium

But halfway through, those sounds fade

and you're lost in the labyrinth

of the ear, listening to the sea

of blood drumming the tympanum, the surf

of sound waves spiraling in the cochlea,

the neurons singing synapse. You're inside

the silence so far, your body

is the only world. So it's a shock

when someone coughs and brings you back

to this unreal room, a shadow

watching shadows, an echo

hearing echoes, like the souls

chained in Plato's cave. Your life flickers

on death's wall. What music can transform

shadow to substance, echo

to original score?

Your heart repeats its one note

and you listen harder, a musician now,

as the shadows drift

across the stage like snow

and find you silent, bereft.

David Jauss, "Homage to John Cage" from Improvising Rivers. ©1995 by David Jauss. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter/

Mark Rothko was a twentieth-century American painter. 

"Homage to John Cage": An American poet, David Jauss taught creative writing at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock from 1980 to 2014. He has published two volumes of poetry and four collections of short stories.