George Reiner: Two Poems

after Tabula Rasa: II. Silentium.

is this birth? breathless under violin strings, the piano’s hesitation trying to anchor itself in my stomach.

is this birth? cloud break light shafting through thin chords. I think killing is high pitched in its savage simplicity, in its either/or — a sign for subtraction followed over the edge. the beating stops, an eye fails to blink, heat retreats from the fingers, a diminuendo to rest in.

but if a minus plus a minus is a plus, since subtractions must lie over one another, is that why your desire for life sounds like an ending? an ending without an end is endless and a meaning without a means is meaningless. you are pulled in every direction, so you stand still. you are un-handed. is this before the birth?

“You can kill people with sound and if you can kill, maybe there is the sound that is the opposite of killing”
                    — Arvo Pärt in conversation with Björk 

a lone robin fills a forest with its song, draws out its emptiness & widens it like a lone chair in a large white room, like footsteps off screen till it melts away as if waiting to be filled.

the sound engulfs its own echo, engulfs everything, like a lively sneeze, a child’s laughter, into its own circumference. this liturgy is too serious, too undeniably present, the world stops on the down beat so doves float, olive trees calcify, so night no longer exists.

I cry at these unkept promises for frost cannot last past noon & wind isn’t visible without grass moving so why, in imitation of “a minus plus a minus is a plus”, do the hairs around my body trap air like deathbed confessions? 

bone-house  

        — from the Anglo-Saxon, bānhūs

like furniture for a house

             I cannot see or feel

        my bones inside me

but if you press

     your finger into the top

             of my head,               

                  my hands or feet

there will be bones

the smallest

                            in my ear

        vibrates,

  my tongue-bone

               articulates

a refusal

                                to join

with every other bone

          my collarbone

is designed 

                        to break

             I am proud

                        to have built

my body’s bricks

since birth

a house

after my death

               they’ll outlast me

                       for centuries

archaeologists

               will piece

                together

          my ladder-like ribs

              their chemical 

        composition,

their fractures

                              – yearly

         growth measurements

on the door frame

they will piece together

                             my sex

        through my pelvis

     – another     door     for 

entering

                        my home

           its dining room,

DIY cupboard and stairs

                    all inlaid with bone

its strength

from being designed

                            to break.

George Reiner is a poet, translator and writer based in Ramsgate, UK, whose work can be found in Pamenar Press, Datableed, and Green Linden Press.