The Politics of Silence by M. Ann Hull

The Politics of Silence
by M. Ann Hull

I. Fabrication

Mute from the music we lock in boxes, whatever wonder their wires make, the lids pulled tightly up to the teeth in waking, frightened, to hear the clicking tick, even if untouched, off, of note by note, at night.

II. Excavation (1375*, 1897**)
…from the hounds* who howled their prey up to the lip of death, (like cleave is clutch and cut together/apart), a mute herd was the pack whose shrill call was the kill impending—a mute herd made the owls afraid of their own hooting and the rabbit fit to dip into his hole at a the pacing of a paw over a rose, the thorn emitting its own sharpened scream from the bushes’ tips, and tipped, there is a sound even petals take when their red (to be muted, as with colors, is to be damped or toned down**) is netted by moonlit light. Always, with the mute,there is a chasing involved, always, there are chasers and chased, choosing to lock their jaws in boxes, waiting for wires to be tripped.

III. Personalization
…from the mother, a strategy transmitted parent to child, to teach the little one how to fight her fear of the other sibling, (always there are chasers and are chased), an elaborate blueprint laid to keep the other’s teeth from sinking canine deep, from the hounds, into the younger’s skin. …from the mother who herself is a muse of the muther of things unsaid. [Merriam adds “remaining silent, undiscovered or unrecognized.”] To the father figure, fight in the cut of his jib, just waiting to fling a word into her face.
A way to go limp by lip, to limit the fallback of possible provocation. A learned conspiratorial cold shoulder, as though mother/daughter could smoke sister/father out, should the latter mutate from fur with teeth to wings with stingers waiting with thrill of the strike to pounce or flit.

IV. Speculation
Black is not a void but the presence of every color reflected back. To be mute is to be saying everything unsaid uncertainly simultaneous in tone and touch. To be mute is the omnipresence of murmuring as far back as the epiglottis goes. If the art of conversation is an art, it is the art of color by number. If the art of silence is a disease, what inanimate isn’t a carrier of the hush before the scream? To be muted (1853) is to be ever collecting what’s half-fermented out of the wine, still in the stain of the teeth.

V. Eradiction
Sick of the epithet dumb, by March 26, 1890, Helen Keller began her lessons in speech imitation—though whether the mouth or the fingers are the more eloquent is still a matter of interpretation. According to Archibald’s claim, “a poem should be palpable and […] / as a globed fruit.”

M. Ann Hull is the current poetry editor of Black Warrior Review and an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. Her work has most recently appeared in Quarterly West.