29 Silence poems

An envelope arrives unannounced from overseas containing stark white sheets, perfect in their presentation of absence. Only a bold logo on top revealed its origin, but absolutely nothing else. I examined the sheets, peered through their grains — heavy cotton-laid striations — concealing text,in white ink, postmarked India. Even the watermark’s translucence made the script’s invisibility transparent. Buried among the involute contours, lay sheets of sophisticated pulp, paper containing scattered metaphors — uncoded, unadorned, untouched — virgin lines that spill, populate and circulate to keep alive its breathings. Corpuscles of a very different kind — hieroglyphics, unsolved, but crystal-clear.

Alas, so all things now do hold their peace! Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing; The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease, The nightès car the stars about doth bring; Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less: So am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring, Bringing before my face the great increase Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing, In joy and woe, as in a doubtful case. For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring: But by and by, the cause of my disease Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting, When that I think what grief it is again To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.

Underneath all of it there's a quiet i've been excavating toward for years not emptiness not peace exactly just: the quiet below the noise i've touched it a few times briefly it's there

The silence in this house is made of glass i walk through it carefully i haven't broken it yet i'm not sure i want to

The quiet hours between 2 and 4 belong to a different version of me she has no plans she has no obligations she just sits here in the quiet and waits for morning

Everything i didn't say to you takes up a lot of room some days the unsaid is louder than anything i could have said i don't know if that's grief or just bad timing

Silence knows more than it lets on it was there for all of it the conversations the arguments the nothing and it kept everything

Quiet house midwinter afternoon the kind of quiet you can touch i sit in it and let the quiet do its work

There is a kind of silence that isn't empty at all it's full of everything you chose not to say i live in that silence