A buzzing in the ears as if bees

were swarming in my thoughts
or as if my head had become

a clearing in the forest
filled with the never-too-late serenades

of cicadas at summer’s end
makes me long for the gritty obscurity

of the west’s waves
or the suave silence of eastern lagoons

through which pouting fish
mutely swim. On the other hand,

if I listen carefully enough
to the sound of my own listening,

I might eventually hear something.
The hum of longing seems to fade at last

into a kind of aural impasto,
thick and bland, without apparent surface

but also without depth.
Neither meniscus nor void, without perspective,

not flat and not profound,
without extent or distance, not able to be touched

and incapable of penetration,
not flattened so as to stack up the shoreline,

the sea, the salty spume, the sky,
but not tricked out as a mirrored infinity

or a beach-walk into the never-never,
neither free nor necessary,

not imaginary and not a law of nature,
not spirit, not matter, without colour

but not the whiteness of all colour,
not abstract, not phenomenal,

not even the kind of paradox
that would let me end this

hapless catalogue, not ‘a jar’
both round and empty that might make

the wilderness gather itself
around a hollow core of form, nothing like that,

nothing like ‘a long-legged fly’
walking lightly on water

as a metaphor for the mind
moving across the surface of silence,

nothing like that – 
so what am I saying? That this may be

the sound of consciousness?
But how, then, to imagine the silence

of oblivion, a kind of oxymoron,
since there can be no silence

where its opposite doesn’t equally prevail,
the waterlogged yells of those

whose upraised arms
mark places where the frothing rip

drags forests of kelp
in the direction of shipwrecks

whose phosphorescent ribs
flicker above their beds of black iron-sand,

or the hilarious shrieks
of revellers impacting

on the dawn-flushed harbour?
Yes, this could be the no-sound no-silence

of oblivion, but what
would I know? It’s the busy world

that sits outside my window
as if across a table

with wine and food on it.
Indifferent to the buzzing in my ears,

asking only that I listen and respond,
the world tells me stories.

That car whose windscreen glints across the bay
has a sad man in it. That yacht whose bow

pecks the wrinkled harbour
will still be tethered when

the next tide turns. The squawky sound
of talkback radio seems to come

from a patch of sunlight
or from the cat that basks there.

I want to call out to my lifeguards,
the one who watches my hope

flailing at the rip, the other
incurious as I loll in dismay:

Over here, guys. Find a seat. Fill a glass.
Help yourselves. Has anyone told you

what a great job you do?
It’s never too late. But listen to that.

You’re not going to believe it. 
Tell me, friends –

what does that sound like to you?