the inquiry Somebody proposes to coax music
out of a flower pot, a copper pipe, a fire extinguisher.
He hammers truck springs into a glockenspiel,
creates a drum from a downed Cessna’s fuel tank.
Weaving his way across the thawing campus,
past first resurrections of earliest lilac,
he reimagines music as a goldfinch
whose undulations perforate the hemlocks.
Or, somebody is trying to hear silence
perforate the edges of a poem
she gathers out of noise in her ruled notebook.
She spends one nighttime pacing her square dorm room.
She’ll spend a lifetime capturing one silence.
And in the studio, the student sculpture
tilts drunk with color, chance, and superstition,
and each new drawing has the chance to change us,
and each new drawing is a sutured wound,
and each new drawing is a holy rite
that somebody keeps trying to make sense of.
In the pale moon of light a desk lamp throws
over the papers of a visiting philosopher,
a question wakes up like a freshly born
mammal. Stretches its limbs into new
possibilities, demanding our nurture
like any new creature. How does one learn
to approach it with tenderness?
Our enterprise is to attend the birth
of inquiry, and what comes after.
We start each day by gathering to listen
for the warm breathing of the youngest thing,
and take our omens from the flight of birds.
A poem by faculty member Michael Dumanis for Bennington’s tenth president, Mariko Silver.