Donald Illich

No Sound Could Save Me

Here's how it was:
singing my way to birth,
cracking questions to my Mom,
saying clever things
I didn't know were wise.
 
My mouth opened
for schoolmates, teachers,
parents, releasing a tongue
that defeated them all.
 
As time passed,
nouns and verbs broke
over education's rapids,
learning how to be human.
 
I heard melodies in language
I used to heal my wounds,
rhythms I banged on the table
when I wanted to be reborn.
 
At the end, no sound
could truly save me.
 
I had to recognize salvation
in silence, a room where I was
and wasn't, a fly
on my forehead,
my skin cooling its feet.

---

Average Bear

It lumbered toward picnics
with average speed, mauled
hitchhikers in a methodical way.
Inside the cave it hibernated
in the expected time, recovering
from inactivity like you'd expect.
It wanted one day to chase
a park ranger up a tall tree
or be a mother, raise cubs
that would be extraordinary.
Until then it was a basic bear,
predictable, each action shown
in a guide, with the numbers
fitting it like a silver cage,
one it couldn't escape, a life
where every bear was smarter
or dumber, and could not be trusted
to behave.  Better to sleep, lay
in the yellow meadow of flowers
and weeds, where each make believe
image was the same as its living one,
but crisper, more awake, everyone
a tool of its fortune, to be eaten
or ignored, to be the unknown
lover, moving toward it, adequately.



--
Donald Illich’s work has appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, LIT, Nimrod, Passages North, Rattle,Sixth Finch, Memoir(and), West Wind Review, failbetter,Del Sol Review, Roanoke Review, and Anti-. He’s been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize and received a scholarship from the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference.