Noises (For John Cage) Poem by Jack Galmitz

He's gone into the sound and silence
he was so much. Now rain
drops on five stones
in the garden where they were placed
just so the wind would ride
their humped bones. He left duration
of rain on stone to itself. Is
that a whip snapped or a taut bow
string reverberating? It is an echoing sound.
Clay pots in the garden. Some
cracked. Some with holes.
Cacti and blossoming weeds
in most are stout and flip the water drops
back to the air to return again to the stones
and sacks nearly decomposed to fibers
of sisal or jute. There are bamboo plants
spread close to the mud wall of the house.
One was cut down and in it a flute was found.
It is the color of his bones and will be played
later on if the wind remains, though it doesn't
have to be the same as before.
Someone is making a dugout
canoe with wooden mallet and wooden gouge.
Perhaps to cross over in, though this is in doubt,
there being no place else.
Perhaps it's to make hollow percussive sounds
of differing depths.
The sound is more like that.
Think they're building stairs from
the knocking that he is hears. A whetstone
a blade crosses quietly to an edge. Then the simple
scraping of spare pieces of wood out of which
emerges a man and the flute blown with the wind
of the lips and the wind. Water falls from the gutter
into a basin or a tub left for that purpose near
the bamboo and the mud. There are dancers moving
outward with their arms held to their sides
freely on rough soles on a wooden floor. It sounds
like scraping until they stop and stare out
at nothing there. Suddenly there is what sounds
like a two handled saw being whipped in the wind
then swung. Then an unsettling of the water in the
basin the sopped earth gulps.
Maybe, it's just children pounding pegs into holes:
he would have liked that.
Is that an electric violin scratching the trellis of roses?
No, it must be a newspaper page caught and blowing
In the hedges.