Most love poems fill the air with declarations. This one praises what happens when nobody speaks. Its speaker begins with a plain confession, "I like our silences," then spends the rest of the poem working out why. The answer is that silence is where the speaker can finally trust that the other person is real, and that they themselves are.
The form suits that idea. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only free verse that moves at the pace of a hesitant thought. Lines are pushed across the page by indentation, so "shared moments" and "in the existence" hang off to the right. The white space becomes a kind of silence the reader has to cross. Ampersands replace "and" throughout, which makes the poem feel handwritten and private, closer to a note passed between two people than a public statement. The opening is deliberately simple. "I like" is almost childlike, and that plainness gives the later abstractions something to push against.
The first real tension is between two kinds of looking. The "hungry gaze" wants to consume, while the silence they share floats into "a simple but absolute attention." The phrase "I see you seeing me" doubles the act of sight until it becomes a loop. The next line is the most vulnerable in the poem: "I can believe / in the existence / of what you see." The speaker's sense of self seems to depend on being witnessed. Quiet is needed because speech would only distract from that evidence.
The central image arrives in the third stanza, where the other person's silence speaks "like star-light speaks of intense heat." It is a precise comparison. We never touch a star. We receive its light and infer the fire behind it. Silence works the same way, as "a secret / revealing in concealment," a message that carries warmth across "immense distance." The lines then step down the page, "warmth" and "& life" each indented further than the last, as if the light were arriving slowly.
Next the poem moves from sky to earth. "In silence, as in soil, / slow roots grow strong" leans on sibilance, with those repeated s sounds hushing the line. Then comes "the dilation of every second," a phrase that can suggest time stretching and also a pupil widening in the dark. Time itself is called "depraved," a harsh moral word that casts the clock as a tyrant the couple briefly escape. Human beings are reduced, almost coldly, to "a complex pattern / woven from / a fabric of neurons / & electrostatic dreaming." The poem lets science describe them at its most reductive, then insists on something beyond it.
The turn comes through a gap in the text: "to become // something more." The vagueness is deliberate. The speaker cannot name what the couple become, and admits to being "only sure" it exists when their bodies "twist together." The poem's grounding is physical. "Sharing our body heat" quietly answers the starlight image, since the distant warmth is now close enough to feel. Even the spiritual language is bodily: attention is "the prayer" they give, and it is offered through touch.
The ending avoids a tidy resolution. The speaker looks "beyond the iris reflection," past the small image of themselves in the other's eye, to a place "where it lays waiting." The last words, "in the silence," sit alone and far to the right, so the poem finishes inside the thing it has been describing.
The poem's significance lies in how it reverses a common assumption. Silence is usually treated as an absence, a gap or an awkward pause. Here it carries the whole relationship. The poem also holds together things we usually keep apart: astronomy and prayer, neurons and devotion, doubt and faith. The speaker never claims certainty. The verbs stay careful, "I can believe" and "I am only sure," which makes the tenderness feel earned. It suggests that to love someone is to attend to them so completely that words become unnecessary.