Animal Silence

 

    If you look at this cat, Ari Figue's cat, it will occur to you that what you see and experience of its silence is not her silence at all; does not belong to them--to the animals, does not begin or end with them, but rather, to all that lies hidden on the other side of speech, to everything the words deny. They meet us emerging from this silence, moving toward us, rising out of white space, but never fully there, a surface impenetrable: animate markings on a blank page, unreadable convergence of being and silence, neither theirs nor ours.

Our collective, genetic biological material efflorescence opens and closes, opens and closes: unique moments of entropic dissolution.

 These are the words he saw on the page. He wrote them. He does not know what they mean. A convergence whose Emperor is the illusion of the first person singular. You see (he tells himself) all along what he heard as the Voice, was only silence, a deeper silence, a more than bodily silence, a river of silence upon which the I moves as a leaf carried on the surface of the stream.

Taking Leave of the Animals

We cannot begin without taking leave
He said when he turned us away
Fire leapt from his tongue

Instead, we gathered the names, leaving the animals
Speechless in the forest brakes, the river's course.
Only now do we understand the nature of our loss

We cannot begin without taking leave
They were more than we could bear, these words.
They grew fruitful and multiplied

We hung them on every bough.
There were not enough trees to hold them.
They fell to the earth like leaves

We cannot begin without taking leave
Our lips are dry with trying
Our fingers sign what we cannot say

How can we leave
What was never ours to begin with?
How can we ever return what we found
in their burning, silent eyes?