what should be happening never is what’s happening so
instead of writing ‘snow falls silently’
indicating that snow falls from the sky without making a sound
I write ‘silence falls over the snow’ and that’s impossible
silence can’t rain down on anything
it simply invades things like snow
that comes from a place invisible and thus impossible to locate
who emits the silence that falls upon the snow in the poem?
things like this happen all the time in poetry
someone knocks on the door of your subconscious
and when you get up to open the door they’re already gone
left a closed box on your welcome mat
you open it and inside there’s a bomb
the countdown timer instantly activates
you think about the silence that falls over snow
and the ice cream truck melody seeps through the open window
tick tock tick tock the bomb in your hands
your arms moving like the tail of a whale
that dives again after coming up for a bit of air
and the bomb, which travels by air and touches down on top of the serving platter
with lime ice cream
in the ice cream truck
it’s not silence that falls on the snow
what rains down upon the snow is the bang
the sharp and final shriek of death
silence
you now know
is the bare remains
of a primeval crash (big bang)
seconds after the creation of the universe
milleniums prior to the invention of poetry
translated by Kevin Cole
