Silence is the Ninth Note

It ain’t where you put your words; it’s where you don’t.
-Evidence, MC from Dilated Peoples

Simon and Garfunkel knew this darkness as an old friend.
It’s the sound of your life ended. It starts when everything
stops, when the clock battery ceases its pink marching

and drum thumping. Sound already busts the soul’s
eardrum with divine vibrations, a siren song spawning libation.
Bacchus cocks his head like an attentive dog and deals

the Queen of Bliss to all who listen. But at any given musical
moment when the Muse inspires a reversal of relation,
a comment on Einsteinian theory, when the auditory periphery

is plucked inside-out, when Nothing fills the volume
you behold a Golden Silence—a quiet blurring of cosmic
and earthly energy, the Netjer of the Double Reed Leaves

(the relationship between vital harmonic growth
and the phi-fueled Golden Mean structure of nature).
It becomes quiet as Ramses’ tomb, treble and bass pause

61.8% through the song to play the ninth note of the tune,
then resume to elevate its intake to sublime tingles,
eyes forced shut so the third can spy the universal spirit—

and then the Golden Silence poofs away, though the soul-
poking stays, intensifies as the sound engages in a lift off—
both soul and sound ejaculate into the milkiness,

‘things’ now as easily seen as the green of the fans
on the ginkgo tree outside, senses heightened and deadened
while knowledge is nothing yet I know everything,

I feel the impossibility of tick-tocks before sensing
a descent to the place where I stood with eyes shut
for mere moments, right after the bass stopped,

right after sound gave way to silence, at the point
where ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ collide, where the sun
sets on the horizon of cerebral logic, where water

becomes steam, where ‘you’ become meaning
and meaningless, where time breathes its last sign,
where bungee jumps hover, where Freud meets Jung.