White Noise

A poem

White Noise

.

True white noise

Is not the hum

Of a refrigerator

With its rhythmic lull

Of electronic breath

It is, instead

The arctic on a windless day

.

An engulfing lack

.

I read about a woman who went there

Alone

And that’s what she remembers most

Absence and fullness coexisting

Seamlessly

Bandage on a colourless wound

Weeping and absorbing

.

I think about it often

That level of nothingness

Eyes and ears syncing

As tinges of steel blue and pearl

Depart the flat face of snow

When it neither falls

Nor melts

Suspended as a raft

Of voiceless doves

.

Or ice without gleam

As clouds of human heat

That exit stiff bodies

Go unheard

Bread tongues

To milk air

I imagine my senses

Knitting layers of calm together

A quiver-free space

Between dropped and held

.

Since I read about

The way she described it

With passionless passion

It made me realise

That all my versions of ‘quiet’

Are stained and marred

Inferior iterations

.

Libraries are little cities

Of groans and coughs and shuffles

Gardens rattle and scuttle

Night is not ‘still’

For owls hoot and screech

Glaring street lights crane their necks

As modern phantoms

Bouncing their flash

Upon the exposed windows

Of my stone tomb house

.

And I lie here

2am in summer

Head looping on descriptions

Of an elusive, arctic silence

Not mine

*Photos my own

Meaning

I really do know a lady who visited the arctic circle who said this. I’ve only been as far as Iceland (falls just south of it) and I visited tourist areas - which were anything but quiet!

After she relayed that, I began to read about other people who had been there alone. Sometimes, their experiences are not disimular to those seeing mirages in the desert. After a while, the plain white landscape plays tricks on the mind, especially coupled with the physical endurance needed to survive those conditions.

But the silence intrigued me most.

I suppose because it is something I prize. It made me revisit and reevaluate what I had always thought of as ‘silence’. My first memory of an attempt at it, was at infant school. We had a teacher, Mrs Williams, who used to deliberately cultivate quiet, coaxing us to listen for ‘a pin drop’. How calm it was, but even then there was the sound of 30 children breathing! I think that’s where my quest for it began. I long for a velvet level of silence, like an alabaster rose I can sink into.

PS: Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, you can find more poems under the heading ‘poetry’ on my home page.