Silence
is the ultimate response
to impulse, to importunity;
it casts its veil, its cloudlike mist
over lost opportunity.
In the pressing heat of those long summer days,
amid sonorous sounds of morning cicadas,
the icicle pierced, a splinter, a knife,
into the centre of my life: winter weighed in:
and as a frozen apple on the frost-whipped tree,
so died all feeling between you and me.
Your eyes, your smile,
the eternal feminine mystery,
returning, returning, recharged
in each cycle of human history.
The daily e-mails,
the archives of non-dawning day:
nothing, nothing could match their wonder
nor match their sense of play. Now
there are no e-mails at all.
Dear sweet girl.
Your black sparkling eyes,
your body like a bolt of thunder!
We met in June, parted in July,
and at times I can only wonder
why, why these things
come down like summer storms?
The approach of love
is as sudden as a flight of birds
over a morning lake, a rustle of wings
over stillness, a descent again into silence.
We had affection, yes.
We had style and languorous grace!
But when I reached out for your heart
there was nothing there, an absence,
nothing but an empty space.
Silence
is the ultimate response
to all the things we hope for,
to all the things we fear,
to all the things we cannot understand.
When you die, sweet girl,
as we all must die, a kaleidoscope
of images will flash, unbidden,
across your agéd, your withered brain,
and of our time, this pulsating summer,
no memory will remain.
And that will be the final end.
That will be the end. But will it?
Long after you and I are dust and clay
some earnest future scholar may
unearth this poem, and recall
the beauty, the cruelty of it all.
