Silence is a Lonely Place

Silence is a lonely place
an island teeming with one tree
sitting bare in my palm.

Silence is the space where we come together
and apart between heartbeats
and through the black rock of your garden.

Silence is my city past the notion of space,
where my feet drop through the door in the floor
the soft part where I slip through the molecules.

Silence is this breathing underwater
this crash-landing
this hum and tremble of succumbing to gravity.

Silence is you on a hilltop,
dirt on your jeans,
under your nails.

Silence is space
like love is space
like music is the undoing, the eating of space.

Silence is temporal
the words that hover over your head seconds after you said them
floating like black and white birds.

Silence is heartache
and need. It is the mouth stretched open
the teeth a gateway, the tongue a captured creature.

Silence is what I keep in a locket.
What I give the living and the dead, and the half-born and the never-gone
and the wood and the aluminum and the saltwater and the steel.

It is what I give.
It is all I ever give
and it is always misunderstood.