More on: silence

It was bigger than me And I felt like a sick child Dragged by a donkey Through the myrtle. ————-—Vic Chesnutt I dipped my hand in the wrong pond plucked the black rose did not know that I did not know The red wolf bit me I bit back I was pulled by a beast…

Last night I climbed once more the narrow ladder of my poems. I took my fine pen and turned paper into ash. What were you turned into? What did you become, after? Once you said that to write a poem is to touch the unseen. If I have touched the unseen, it has not been…

My words verge on silence like great birds that disappear into the early evening: their strenuous white wings carry off the intense sweetness of dusk, visible then in starlight. My words turn toward the night with no look back at what is lost or won, or what is missing, like those workers, who, utterly fatigued…

IN THE FIRST DAYS of May, 1610, the renowned Confucian scholar Li Madou lay dying in his home in Beijing. Hundreds of the leading citizens of the Chinese capital came to pay their respects to the man whose books on ethics, mathematics, friendship, and the mysteries of life and death had been read and circulated…

At the Synagogue Rummage Sale during Holocaust Remembrance Day Basement, Butler, Pennsylvania, the gentiles bargaining for old tallises, worn yarmulkes, a torn challah cover, a stained torah, a hundred thumbed copies of Anne Frank— I walk out and past a circle of bat mitzvah-aged girls and our rabbi, who stops me and asks if I’ll…

There’s a church where I sit on my lunch hour when the silence within me cries out for its counterbalance without—the only sounds the clinks and clanks of old radiators working in winter and birds nesting up in the buttresses in spring, the mediated mumble of traffic and the echoing feet of those who come…

Ezekiel 24:17 said the Lord, this sigh indiscernible, although the si– contained is louder than the second fiddle, second syllable that ebbs into its chopped-off sibilance. The first one lasts awhile, the way we wish that pleasure would endure, the vowel long. It’s hard to leave the bed it’s made, mouth wide until the utterance…