It’s a short and shrill one,
Sometimes distant like it’s taken by the wind
From the cemetery below
Or sometimes it’s ever sharper,
As if the girl from the Blue house herself—
At least I think it’s that girl from that Blue house—
Were right here over my bed,
Persistent in her aching toward such a loud
And even nothingness,
Screaming it down my eyes,
Clamping them open.
And I think about the fear in the hills,
The hills as they surface in my futured mind.
Fear in that scream
Upon which mother once called the police
Because it was so consistent
Yet so indistinct that it heightened an itch
Behind and beyond any condition of safety—
A brief terror of a sound and small dark opening
Through which to view the mystery,
The catastrophe,
As it shrilled every fifteen seconds ago,
Unable itself to even cross the street
No matter how many overgrown
And undergrown neighborhoods like mine
It belched itself over by way of the skies and miles.
It was poignant,
Sounding for half of each brief duration
Perfectly like a young woman,
Until the remainder of the whole three second sound,
Each time, halfway through, strayed into wonder:
Maybe a coyote or some other wounded animal, alone,
But when I couldn’t sleep I lingered
On that first half of the scream,
The horrified and helpless second-and-a-half-girl,
Who loves and is lost in her sheet like me,
But maybe a little louder,
Maybe, even hopefully, a little less articulate.
My mother, I remember, the first time
I crept across my property,
Wondering within about that sound without,
Only heard the scream after I pointed it out to her,
At which point I wondered if I had the crazies,
The screams-in-the-head kind of thing,
And had, in turn, by pointing them out to my mother,
Infected her with the crazies, the screams,
And maybe even the police officer
Who patrolled the screams that night,
After the scream was in my head,
After I had convinced my mother that it was screaming enough,
Unnatural or too natural—I don’t remember which—
To be scary, to be worrisome for the children
Like me in the neighborhood.
But I heard them the other night,
Having been gone for a year
And long tucked away in my memory the screams
In what I imagined to be the smile-over-the-eyes
Kind of madness
In the overflowing, vaguely flower masked Blue house.
I guess I heard them in high school too,
But I guess they were more or less part of me by then,
And maybe I implicitly recognized
Before leaving what I knew explicitly upon returning,
That there need be no inner questions,
As the screams are more likely real than not,
Just like you.
More likely that the world is screaming,
And you are just wondering
In some odd peace.
