Friday, February 19, 2010

Silence is Golden

Hunter of Silent Flight

I don’t know how to bend her heart. My word-barrages only
tend to separate us. Its her fault; she drives me to these flights.
Near her I grow increasingly lost, energies dispersed, elemental
and dissolved. Nothing like control remains. I am all gut, windy.
All Desire. All Want. All set in flux like nature, moving
everywhere at once. I try to hold my tongue, think "Quiet.
Steady," but the word-tide I cannot stem drowns my cause,
threatens to deluge my best, and tender, and kind intentions.
Why should words come into play at all? Words are strangle-holds
in an ill-advised and hopeless cause. Silence says much more.
More silence tongue or else, I fear, she’ll point us toward the door.

Or maybe words chisel things, hunt for
a voice that would not speak, that would prefer
to sing if only sing it could. And I a Michelangelo
confronted with a silent block of promise, a figure locked
within--one only I detect--then called to name the yet-
born thing the only way I can. Still, because she knows
my oafishness, and all the clumsy routes I’ve gone, she
knows that I’m no artisan. Not only can’t I sculpt or
sing, words remain a clunky thing I toss out like an
army made of breath, excavating passing things,
things beyond my depth, the things that pass between
us pure, beyond all fashioning. Unspoken flights I seek
to name with an arsenal of words, though pass they do
like eyes askance, or flee like flying birds. The meaning
that I want to make, with words I hope illuminate, of all
these words that come and go, the best of them is “Love.”

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