Moiré

  Though, probably, it’s just a rumour
  there is a bus driver who says
  that there was once seven minutes of
  
  silence at Pine Gap.
  Not any particular time ago
  that’s classified
  
  but the power went out,
  as power is always threatening to do
  but never doing often enough.
  
  In the poetic pause between
  the outage and the backup,
  there was a music -
  
  the kind that humans have hardly seen. 
  Some sort of parallel architecture,
  sympathetic and erasing, a void attacking,
  
  reconstructing the night with
  silence and confession. 
  Both of them unhurt, or just unheard.
  
  Wives told husbands they didn’t love them
  children told parents they hated them
  grandparents told the night they’d be happy to die.
  
  Officials said it was only an interference pattern,
  the decay of unobserved existence,
  not the tree nor the wood nor the falling.