by lewis levenberg
Mornings ride higher when their dull cacophanies remain muffled. At least, the sounds of waking, when they fail to rouse you, seem sweeter: think garbage trucks. Your neighbor’s alarm clock beckons, rude chirp and rattle, unless it finds barrier in wall, door, pillow. Sleeping late, though no self-sustained reward, requires quiet, but even rising’s aches fade when violet daylight forgoes violent din.
So too with the work of thought, of producing knowledge, of creative struggles. Comfort can beget security in these patterns, and confidence. Outside the clouded window today, the dogwood’s bloomed out. The magnolia’s tried and failed to speak its own name, lustrous in damaged repose. The heater’s clank rebounds against the wallframe. Trained to rise on short sleep, my legs protest and I find a chair against my judgment, breaking habits of motion and verticality. Languid newspaperman does deliver. Anachrony, idiosyn, twerk: no values in the pre-dawn stillnesses.
I brew strong coffee, stare ceramic miles past the brown steam, clothes of death. Decide. To weak attention, offer no torturous concentration. Best to decide to avoid decision temporarily, I think. You shift and fidget, the uneasy sleep of one who hears against one’s will. I tie my shoes.
The scuffs of dogpaws, of concrete sidewalks, of public transport seats, these grace the shoe’s toes, sing atonal ditties. Pitched so high above a human register it barely registers as sound, an electronic twinge emanates from flourescent office. Less than miles away, commuter trains force soggy laborers to ongoing doom. Cut or potted flowers echo the forgotten stiffsore muscles, the railrhymes. Meticulous details escape me as the blue sun shivers.
What extended hells sprout when silence – true, terrible – outstrips these background noises? Coins and paper money bellow from their hiding-places that the day’s a clamor for their ‘cumulation. More and more and more cartires rush against asphalt just there, before the dogwood petals in descent, in yellowing resignation. In a doppler-faded whistle, in the squeak of other doors’ reports, in final birds’ whirrs, in the slighted sigh of sleep abandoned, the weight of an unimportant dawn revels in small noises.
Let them know that you live – shut out their tones and fall to morning.
Tags: Body, essay, introspection, lewis levenberg, Literary, morning, noise, poetics, prose, song, work, Writing
