Two Definitions of Noise by Allen Guy Wilcox

We awake in a four-poster to the gradient sheen of atomic light, 
a static conclave of still blinking stars 
in the lace curtain caverns of our continuous half-life.
This morning a web of mass and matter, refulgence and collapse,
of dust, gas, and prismatic irradiance: our pincushion cosmos
slouching shy and bracingly bold, like our backwards dreams of the twentieth century. Our—

This daybreak of potential, a lakeside Heisenberg annotation 
scored on every instance, for posture and chemistry, like oxygen and its catalyst,
the polarity of humor and repulsion, the very truth of follicles and fragrance; a crucible:
this suspended, gnawing—could it be? over the pall of morning.  How has what happened to happen
happened for you? Still I can’t help making you laugh. Your laughter—

Snarl of lost television stations as the floorboards receive us. Us—
and the uniform—not silence, but leveraged drone—the boy with a radio dish, 
gathering waves, tracing a diode like fingertips the central wisp 
of the known and unknown universe, “letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’.” 
The girl, refracting a distantly and dimly dialed din, a frequency; 
and muttering into the outer ambience, outside this place a protective grimace, 
hailing back into relations, group chats, iphones and apps, your starchart, your job.

A confabulation, a game of retirement chess. 
A station, an old television. Postage stamps. 
A post horse. A carrier pigeon. 
A clang of metal. Post haste. 
A rivulet. 
The first heartbeat. 

A mark on a tree. Orlando’s ache—a wood descended from father and mother metals,
stood tall at the window, shading above the rented iron rack of the range 
of this Lost-in-the-Adirondacks Bed & Breakfast, where skillet and egg
set an improbable introduction to the standard earth day. You drink coffee? What 
we just experienced amounted to what I had hoped for—a tomorrow born yesterday—
congealed with all that you petitioned your Guardian Angel to permit you permit yourself. 

Distended, like a mother’s many roles, Mother— 
the grounds I gather, bloomed into a decanter of scalding water,
as when she, in her guise as the earth, hushes, rocks her leaves from an oak tree,
settles over her people in a rocking chair with a knit blanket,
sending wind through the outer ridgelines, advising, trapping little pockets of heat. 

From this odd, old, colorless vortex, an enactment of people, cut-out paper dollies—
an eternity of noise in the background, foreground like the pinprick of nursery seedling, 
some signal point in a spectrum of perception: the anvil flattening the coyote, 
a second styling of noise, the Schumann spikes you appear to set your watch to,
the bullet piercing the hide of the deer while it swallows and limps, barks lightly and limps
through fresh snow—your spirit animal unsheathed. The pierce of my speech 
signaling unwelcome banter, invitation itself a rupture—a tear among tears, a shunt
from the solitary hum, that track traced like the tear shed last night while I was distended—
the recurrence of your indebtedness, looking askance through the atomic violet of 3 am
into a web of sleep REM no longer touches. “How long have you been awake?” It’s quiet—

A quiet of one’s own concatenation, a dream of quiet, chain rattle, book quiet, 
Platonic quiet—the constellation for solitude, its procession of starlight, the redshift, 
that ever-present hum through whose folds and creases, marks and measures, we present God 
our self-portrait in cross-stitch, not gift but worship: colored yarn on a spare quadrant,
a devotional, the missal of self-love, the hard reality of a new number in my phone, and yours, 
a partnership—expeditionary, a rib-wager for life, half-life, for the remainder of this morning,
comprised of whatever good luck I now bring to the breakfast table,
and your (so far) well-argued daily postulates.