29 Silence poems

In our house, all the clocks are turned off and the mirrors Don’t work. We sit like bread in a stay-fresh wrapper, Keep ourselves to our selves. Sometimes the speeches Are so beautiful it hurts. On the porch where we can’t be Seen to smile, the honeysuckle meshes with silent Weeds. We rock back and forth, back and forth in our long Black dresses. Mosquitoes taste our blood and find it good. Inside, candles are lit every night and keep going Until they burn themselves down. We kiss our fingers To our lips like Italians, promise we’ll never look back. Whip-poor-will. When the doorbell rings we don’t answer. In winter, the fur grows long on the horses and the ice Grows long on the eaves. We sleep in the same bed Like good animals, braid our hair together, tailor Our limbs to fit.Conspiracy of wood.

If there were a monument to silence, it would not be the tree whose leaves murmur continuously among themselves; nor would it be the pond whose seeming stillness is shattered by the quicksilver surfacing of fish. If there were a monument to silence, it would be you standing so upright, so unforgiving, your mute back deflecting every word I say.

When the hour is hushed and you lie still, So quiet is the room about me It seems perhaps that you are gone, Sunken to a marble sleep. I hear no sound; my quiet will, Passive as the lambs at rest, Stirs not the quaint forgetfulness But only murmurs, “Sleep is strange!” The low moon at the lattice going Rests no more quietly than you at peace. Hushed is the candle; the hour is late, And I, poor witness of extreme change, I think perhaps then heaven opens Like the unfolding of your hand in sleep— Your cold white hand—to close again— While I sit staring at the marble gate.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

When it became my turn to speak all that my tongue produced was dust. I hold my cat to this. I wear finery. in moments of clarity there is no grace

All that is uncared for. Left alone in the stillness in that pure silence married to the stillness of nature. A door off its hinges, shade and shadows in an empty room. Leaks for light. Raw where the tin roof rusted through. The rustle of weeds in their different kinds of air in the mornings, year after year. A pecan tree, and the house made out of mud bricks. Accurate and unexpected beauty, rattling and singing. If not to the sun, then to nothing and to no one.

And in that city the houses of the dead are left empty, if the dead are famous enough; by day the living pay to see if dust is all that befalls the lives they left behind. Coating even the glassed-in waistcoat in time, coloring the air of the room stripped bare, down four stories of twisted stair it falls, down on the dictionary no longer there. Empty your pockets, empty your hearts, that empty upper room exhorts. Forget the scrap of paper with the missing word for what’s missing— go home to your rented room. Go on. Six cramped quills, one elbow chair, missing a leg, held up all those years by Johnson’s willing it to hold his bulk—now even the “soul hath elbowroom” in that room where scribes scribbled out that quote. In that city the dead never want to get up, just as in life. What can we offer them? Just this dust to cover them deeper, kin to the soot that shadowed their days. Kiss from a wife who no longer wanted to be touched— love, he held, regarded with passionate affection, like one sex to the other, first; or, second, made do with the affection of a friend; or managed merely parental tenderness, third; or, fourth, no more than pleasure with, delighting in; or, fifth, no less than the reverent unwillingness to offend. O had a long sound, as in alone. Her opium. On clean-shirt day he would pay a visit to his wife. Pack meant large bundle of any thing—“on your head a pack of sorrows.” Quiet. The square just off Fleet Street so quiet Carlyle got lost on his way there. Remember the garret floorboards’ complaint, the muffled ruffling of pigeons just overhead? Such silence we fell into stair by stair, the house to ourselves. Tired of London, he claimed, and one was tired of life. Were we just tired? Under the low ceiling as below deck, up where no angle was true, we sank in deeper silence, valedictory, the way it took us in. Volumes of ancient air closed around us, blank, weighted by the latest dust. What had we come to the house of the dead to see? Something exotic? The zebra presented to the queen in 1726? Something exactly as it might have been? Did you yawn first, back among the living? You pulled me from traffic rushing downstream instead of up, that Zambezi best forded from stripe to painted stripe, a “zebra crossing.” I’d looked the wrong way.

A lone voice in the right empty space makes its own best company.

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet as if to say nothing moves me. Then there is the chair. And one speaks of the chair sitting at the table. Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth. The object is a piece of thing before. One shifts in a chair and opens the talk. And the time it says nothing one moves. The table is too long as the wall. Not a thing but it stays and one opens as a mouth will begin. Speaking of the table, nothing but to avoid that of the wall. One could return over and over to the chair, the wall one is sitting at. Least ways it says nothing. And the thing is, it stays still before speaking of. The object of nothing, even speech.

In the tower the bell is alone, like a man in his room, thinking and thinking. The bell is made of iron. It takes the weight of a man to make the bell move. Far below, the bell feels hands on a rope. It considers this. It turns its head. Miles away, a man in his room hears the clear sound, and lifts his head to listen.