Your body was puzzling, like a half-made figure
Till the final shaping of your voice came
And riotous secrets of lines curved out
And trembled upon your limbs.
Then silence touched your body to motion:
Your limbs released fleeing andantes of pain
And your heart flung little crescents of budding caresses
Into the waiting hunger of your eyes.
Twilight pushes down your eyes
With shimmering, pregnant fingers
That leave you covered with still-born touch.
With little whips of dead words
Silence cuts your lips to a keener red.
Your heart strikes its bed of dark mirth, in death,
And your hands lie over it, guarding the corpse.
Night will soon whisk away this room
But you are already invisible.
Oak tree,
Elm tree,
And apple bough. . . .
Their shadows fall
On the cool green grass.
Shadows of willow trees lie in the shimmering pool,
And the pine trees' flicker
On crystal snow.
(Even the baby, chubby and sweet,
Poised on her tiny, tottering feet,
Casts now her shadow — an instant's gloom,
Over a purple hyacinth bloom.)
Last winter, set in a fire-lit room,
Were two sprays of long-dried goldenrod. . . .
Feathery, frosty plumes.
They were certainly ghostly enough in themselves,
A macaw preens upon a branch outspread
With jewelry of seed. He's deaf and mute.
The sky behind him splits like gorgeous fruit
And claw-like leaves clutch light till it has bled.
The raw diagonal bounty of his wings
Scrapes on the eye color too chafed. He beats
A flattered tail out against gauzy heats;
He has the frustrate look of cheated kings.
And all the simple evening passes by:
A gillyflower spans its little height
And lovers with their mouths press out their grief.
The bird fans wide his striped regality
Prismatic, while against a sky breath-white
A crystal tree lets fall a crystal leaf.
I wonder
how it would be here with you,
where the wind
that has shaken off its dust in low valleys
touches one cleanly,
as with a new-washed hand,
and pain
is as the remote hunger of droning things,
and anger
but a little silence
sinking into the great silence.
O apple blossoms
Give me your words of silence,
Yes, your charming speech.
Could I hear your voice
O but this silence is sweet
Words mar all beauty.
Turn then into your own heart
And pluck the roots from the soil--
Playing in the fire and twilight together,
My little son and I,
Suddenly--woefully--I stoop to catch him.
“Try, mother, try!”
Old Nurse Silence lifts a silent finger:
“Hush! cease your play!”
What happened? What in that tiny moment
Flew away?
A gulf of silence separates us from each other.
I stand at one side of the gulf, you at the other.
I cannot see you or hear you, yet know that you are there.
Often I call you by your childish name
And pretend that the echo to my crying is your voice.
How can we bridge the gulf? Never by speech or touch.
Once I thought we might fill it quite up with tears.
Now I want to shatter it with our laughter.
Violet mystery,
Ringleted gold,
Whiteness of whiteness,
Wherefore so cold?
Silent you sit there--
Spirit and mould--
Darkening the dream
That must never be told!
The last quarter moon of the dying year,
Pendant behind a naked cottonwood tree
On a frosty, dawning morning
With the back of her silver head
Turned to the waking sun.
Quiet like the waters
Of Galilee
After the Lord had bid them
“Peace, be still.”
O silent beauty, indescribable!
Dead, do they say?
Would God that I shall seem
So beautiful in death.
White stars scattering,
Pale rain of spray-drops,
Delicate flash of smoke wind-drifted low and high,
Silver upon dark purple,
The gulls quiver
In a noiseless flight, far out across the sky.