i accept the silence

"Abstraction White Rose" by Georgia O'Keeffe

silent

my dead grandmother

forever silent

and cold

and alone

but there are secrets to be shared

and confidences to be breeched

and promises to be broken

you come to me

you read me your letters

her letters

letters returned

unopened

unanswered

and you tell me

your mother has a black heart

and

glass

your eyes

glass filmed over

by gentle breaths in unforgiving cold

and glass

the wall that separates us

we can see

but not touch

we can look

eyes drifting

desiring

and our hands can reach out

for intimacies that can no longer be realized

your mother has always scorned affection

you say

and my heart wants to jump to my mother’s defense

maybe out of fear that she will hear

from her place so far away

this mute conversation

that gouges loyalty in the throat

i want to tell you about those times

my mother had looked at your black and white photo

hanging on her living room wall

and said she looked like the actress in that old movie

the white rose

but i recognize the past tense

and the word old

is a cloud over a full and beaming moon

i want to tell you my mother

has always been affectionate

but your daughter and my mother

though the same person in appearance

are two different women in essence

so i sit on my chair

in silence

and see you as if through a peeling mirror

mirror

the back of your china cabinet

where i looked at myself as a child

amidst the glimmer of french porcelain

and i counted my freckles as if they were coins

and i thought i could fly

and i remember running down the hill

outside your house

running breathless and effortless

the ground rising like slow motion

rising to meet me

my heart lifting

bloodless and fleshless

feeling like if i stepped into the air

i could fly

before doubt grabbed a hold of me

and wed me to the asphalt

you cleansed my face

of blood and shards of macadam

and your voice was gentle and steady

as you lulled me to sleep that night

and i sit with you now

and your hand is cold

and your face is ice

but even in death you are so beautiful

and tears stream from your eyes

and i try to tell your tears

i try to tell them you are not dead

but they quiet me and tell me about

tormented spirits and haunted souls

and glass

your body

and mirror

your soul

and you are here and you are not

light and weightless

like a shadow on a wall

and i want to say things

grandmama

as if this moment does not know

the meaning of itself

as if to cover the silence

but the words shun my lips

so we sit still

you

with me

with you

and time accordions between us

and we accept the silence

and we close our eyes

and i see

your extinguishing presence

sharp as a pinprick to a blind woman’s finger

and there are yet gulfs to bridge

and labyrinths to unravel

but you speak

as you go

only

of the thirst of a mother

for her daughter’s love

and all of what you say

you say not with your lips

but with your eyes

and all of your words

i hear with my heart

because death and absence

are not an end

but an eternity

and so

i accept the silence

nocturne

"Sleeping Couple" by Ivan Koulakov

it is that time of night

when i withdraw quietly

inside myself

and i go in silence

and rest my head

upon my pillow

and he comes in silence

and rests his head

upon his pillow

that lies at my pillow’s side

and he breathes in shallow draws

and troubles my soul’s harmony

and he turns slightly to one side

and disturbs my body’s repose

and i turn slightly to one side

and look out of the window

into the nebulous night

and i begin

with my nocturnal hallucinations

once more

and the trees are deep

and the sky is low

 and the moon is lackadaisical and alone

and the floor is carpeted with blossoms

iridescent and shaped like stars

 and my candle flickers and shortens

and the rose petals flutter on the rose

and i hear your breaths deepen and slow

and the sky splits open

like the flanks of a tender wound

and the rain rains

and the stars fall out of the sky

and i twist my head

and lay my pulsing lips

upon your murmuring eyes

and your opaque lips unfold and pull me in

and i plummet into the length of your shadow

and your heart is pillow

and my head is cloud

and breaths no longer trouble harmony

nor thoughts disturb repose

and time dissolves like vertigo

and i dream that i am painting my lips

vermilion black

and that i am flying with paper wings

clasped to my shoulder blades

lest wax wings melt and i fall

and i dream that icarus did not die

but sleeps on the bed of the sea
and that morpheus sleeps at his side

and together they dream our fates

and in a lapse of dream

they will turn slightly to one side

and that is when storms will arise

Episodic Flickers in Black and White

                                   Kiss by unknown photographer

This is how it begins…

We are a silent film

shot in black and white

scratchy and grainy

speeding to a soundtrack

of our shortened breaths

Our eyes are electric

with drifting gazes

that blink and unblink to

hair lips shoulders skin

And when they are closed

we feel we are drowsing

heads drifting down

to meet shoulders

on a trip that is longer

than the length of the shot

At moments when we do

look at one another my face

rises from inside you and

your head tilts downward

where lips brush gently

without kissing and eyes

close dreamily and cheeks

meet in a surreal embrace

We are a silent film

filled with haste and though

the scenes speed ahead of us

we are the actors doing all

in a dance of slow motion

Here…

My mouth turns up to your ear

your ear drops down to my mouth

I smile and my teeth gleam white

against the blackness of your

jacket and my eyes glow violet

in the beam of an invisible light

And with my violet eyes’ glow

I see inside you and see you

as if for the first time – but

the seeing will have to wait

because you know and I know

that in this timeless scene the

moments are fleeting and will

drift into the soft light of dawn

But if you should wish me

goodnight without pressing

your lips to mine we will not

have truly embraced my love

And so we stand entwined

on the sidewalk of a quiet

street corner in the milky halo

of a solitary street light

lips pressed to lips

breathless

for a very long time

and though the scenes of this

film are flickering to an end

we do not part but instead –

we reign – in the silence.

… and this is how it ends.

Missing

Hands by unknown artist

I was eight. And he was dead. He might as well have been, anyway. He didn’t seem like the rest of us living humans. Blue lips, heavy and uneven. Yellow eyes, with the skin around them in folds and creases. White hair – not “old” white; just “tired” white. White and long and shaggy – like the rest of him.

Everything about him elicited thoughts of decay and erosion.

He walked out of the bushes in the cruel heat of one midsummer afternoon. I sat on a bench in the park, beside a bronze statue of a horse, with my tongue almost stuck to the roof of my mouth from thirst. And, carefully hiding his face behind a right hand riddled with liver spots and scars, he came and sat beside me. He seemed self-conscious. Embarrassed. And I didn’t know it then, but he also seemed weighed down – like he had a burden on his shoulders. I sat still and observed him. And I wondered how old he could be.

“Do you have kids?” I asked. But he gave no answer, shrugged his shoulders, and looked out at the park.

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have one,” he said.

I didn’t know whether to think that wonderful or terrible. And I couldn’t figure him out because he wouldn’t say anything about himself. He could’ve been homeless, or an escaped convict, or a lunatic, or anything else. I didn’t know.

But I felt no fear of him.

And every afternoon, when the sun was like a big blazing hole in the endless blue sky, I would go to the park and sit at my bench, and he would come out of the bushes with his right hand over his face and sit beside me.

One day, he came to the bench and just stood to the side. There was a flock of geese circling the air above the pond amidst a chattering commotion. A group of teenagers sitting on the grass leaned back their heads and called out to the geese. Other kids crowded around the pond, enticing the geese with bits of bread thrown into the water. But I stayed at my bench and watched in silence. I don’t know why I felt compelled to sit there. I don’t know why I didn’t go claim my own place at the pond.

When the geese landed, he sat. And he lowered his right hand.

I stared at his face, unable to help my gawking curiosity. Five days he had sat with me and kept his face hidden. Now, suddenly, it was in full view. Now, suddenly, I could see, in profile, the blue lips, the yellow eyes, the wild mane of white hair. He held a book in his left hand, and with both hands, he opened the book and started to read aloud. He read to me like we’d known each other forever. And I stopped staring when his voice began to tremble. I listened while he read, drawing circles with my fingers on the empty bench space between us. And he knew I was listening, so he kept reading.

He read to me for many days. His voice was a spider web that, with its threads, created a haven for my wonder. I lived inside that voice, inside the stories it told. At a certain point, it started to feel like he and I were the only two people alive. And I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone with him. It spooked me.

That was when I started to want for him to disappear.

I imagined closing my eyes and opening them to find him gone. I imagined him being hit by a truck and dying because nobody wanted to save such a hideous person. I imagined hurting him, throwing rocks and pebbles at him, making him cry. I imagined telling him he was a freak. “No wonder you have no name,” I imagined saying. “Even your mom didn’t love you enough to give you one.” I imagined telling him I hated his voice, hated his stupid stories, hated him. I’d picture his voice breaking and his shoulders heaving as he sobbed quietly while hiding his ugly face behind his mottled right hand. And for some time, these imaginings were my biggest comfort. The thought of his agony soothed my anxiety.

But I continued to go to the park. And I continued to listen as he read to me. And after a while, my hatred was reversed. I began to realize that, despite his seeming differences, he was ordinary – just like the rest of us living humans. And I also began to realize that I no longer wanted for him to disappear. In fact, I wanted to let him know that I acknowledged his ordinariness. And so, one afternoon, while he held the book in his left hand and read to me, I reached out my fingers that were drawing circles on the empty bench space between us, and placed them over his right hand that idled beside him. He paused – but only for a flicker. Had I been a less perceptive child, I wouldn’t have even noticed. But he paused. And anything else would have been better. He could’ve called out, shouted at me, slapped my hand away. But he did none of those things. He just paused – and in that moment my hand jerked back like I’d touched a red-hot stove burner. Small rivers of perspiration flowed down my skinny legs and pooled around my ankles and beneath my heels. But I didn’t move a muscle. And he continued to read.

The next day, he wasn’t there. I sat on our bench by the bronze horse and waited for him, feeling an immense disquiet building inside me, and all around me. Somehow, inside my eight-year-old heart, I knew I would never see him again. And I blamed myself, even as I hoped that my feelings were deceiving me. I don’t know why this happens, but when someone we care for is no longer there, our hearts are constantly on the prowl for them. It is as if we are in denial, unable to resist the gravity of their absence. Maybe I was in denial, then, as I sat in my tight corner of bench. I think I imagined him hiding behind his bushes and watching me. I imagined him leaping out and saying “Surprise!” But my heart was true. He didn’t come. Not that day. Or the next. Or the next. And I kept going to the park. Sitting on the bench we had shared for days. Waiting for him. Waiting for him to return so I could reverse things and bring them back to our pre-ordinary days. And again, I imagined telling him I hated his voice, hated his stupid stories, hated him. But beneath the surface of my sinister daydreams was a sorrow as vibrant as the blazing hole in the sky.