Because you are gone,
I will never again stand
in your doorway and listen
to the sound of your breath
as you sleep.
I can remember the way
it used to calm me—
the slow, even rhythm
that proved you were alive.
I used to laugh at myself.
As if you wouldn’t be alive.
How farfetched it felt,
the idea of your death.
Now, I hear the absence
of your breath everywhere—
everywhere is a doorway
where I find you are not.
And so I listen.
Sometimes it seems as if a silence
is breathing me,
and somehow, you live in that silence.
I don’t know how it works.
I only know that since you are gone,
sometimes listening feels like communion.
Sometimes when I am very quiet,
when there is no sound at all,
I hear you say nothing.
It’s everything.
Posts Tagged ‘silence’
The Mother Stands in the Doorway
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breath, death, door, doorway, grief, loss, mother, silence, son on November 28, 2022| 12 Comments »
At the Church
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged church, silence on November 13, 2022| 6 Comments »
Come with me, he said,
and he led me up the narrow stairs,
then led me up more narrow stairs
until we arrived in the small sacred nest—
a tiny square room with tall stained glass windows
and two small couches and the kind of silence
one longs to meet—the silence that says,
sister, I have been waiting for you
to climb the narrow stairs to find me.
The silence that says, now that we have found each other
even when you leave,
I will come with you.
Ode to the Echo
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged echo, ode, silence, sound on November 4, 2022| 10 Comments »
Sister of silence, you give back to the world
the shadow of every sound you are given.
You reshape the air to unsharpen the shout.
You unshrill the scream until it’s quieter,
quieter,
then nothing at all.
There is no sound so harsh you can’t soften it.
And come song? You re-sing the melody
so beauty will linger like the rich shimmer inside a gong.
Not once have you said your own words.
Not once have you intoned your own tune.
Not once have you heard your own voice
or spoken your own truth.
Not once have you lied.
Not once have you made a promise
you could not keep.
Sometimes, when I am brave,
I try to echo you, which is to say
I let silence enter my inner walls,
where it bounces in me like sound in a cave
until all I hear is the resonant repeat
of the most ancient of languages you speak—
silence, silence, silence.
There is no part of me uneroded,
no part your waves don’t touch.
Nothing to Say
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged broken heart, compassion, friendship, grief, name, silence on October 9, 2022| 2 Comments »
So I light a candle
and though I am hundreds
of miles from you,
I say your name
into the flame—
your name
and the name
of your beloved
who is gone—
these the only
syllables worth saying.
Then I hold silence for you
the way the earth
holds the ocean,
the way a canyon
holds wind,
the way a broken heart
holds another
broken heart.
At the Potter Ranch
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged nature, open space, silence, sitting, solitude, spaciousness on August 25, 2022| 8 Comments »
Ridgway, Colorado
On a day when the human world feels like a fist—
when it clenches and squeezes,
fierce and relentless—
I leave the four walls and sit
on an old fallen cottonwood tree,
long and silver and smooth.
There, in the center of a wide river valley,
I sit. And sit. And sit.
And the tall green grasses
and the graceful white yarrow don’t refuse me.
And the murmur of waves
and the musk-yellow scent of sweet clover
replace any thoughts, save being here.
The ring of red mesas
with their vast crowns of spruce
form a vase great enough to hold it all—
and I am gathered into spaciousness
along with dark green sedges and white butterflies,
with the tantrums of brambles
and the tangled flight patterns
of thousands on thousands of dark tiny flies.
A flock of birds rise all at once from the river
and my heart and my eyes rise, too.
A long time passes before I am quiet enough
to hear the chorus in the willows,
the bright clicking of insect wings,
the silence that weaves through everything.
Then the flickers come close
and the dragonflies draw nearer in.
And I current. I cloud. I leaf. I wing.
I leave unwalled, un-selved.
The spaciousness comes with me.
Though I Would Converse with You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, silence on July 6, 2022| 8 Comments »
I can be the silence
that touches your skin
like raw silk,
silence soft as a lover’s hand,
silence that holds you
when you have pushed
everyone away, even me.
I can be the silence
that leans in to know you,
silence that opens
like the scent of peonies,
silence that opens
like troughs between waves.
I can be silence
that wears clunky boots
and the silence
of the phone that does not ring.
Though I want to give you
the gift of my arms, the gift
of my ears, the gift of now,
I am learning to be the silence
that gives you the gift of yourself—
silence of patience, silence of time,
generous silence, tender silence,
silence that falls like the softest rain,
silence of sunshine, silence of soil,
silence of leaf, silence of bud
as it grows into what it will be.
On a Quiet Day, I See the Future
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, parenting, silence on June 29, 2021| 4 Comments »
One day, I will walk into the quiet,
calm of the empty home. No TV.
No pinging of phones.
No one asking what there is to eat.
No one wondering if I can drive them.
No one telling me their dreams.
I will hear only the sound
of rain, of thunder,
of the wind rattling the inner doors.
Perhaps I will hear my own pounding heart,
the heart I thought belonged to me.
But there, in the dim light of the storm,
I might at last know for certain
the heart is made for giving away.
There are many ways to love.
Some of them are clearest
when I am most alone.
Mid-Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, friendship, self, silence on June 17, 2021| 4 Comments »
Sometimes
in the silence
between
the small talk
a whole life
is lived—
a life
in which
you are
exactly
yourself
only more so,
a self without
name, a self
of no
where, a
self unselved,
which
is to say
that sometimes
in the silence
of a minute
you find
some vision
so vast
so true
that you weep
before saying,
And how are you?
Listening to the Wind on Mars, I Consider the Unsaid
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, mars, silence, sound, wind on February 23, 2021| 3 Comments »
Just because I can’t hear the wind on Mars
without the sound being raised two octaves
doesn’t mean the Martian wind wouldn’t open a sail—
doesn’t mean it wouldn’t blow off my hat
or fly my kite or create thick swirls of red dust.
Just because I could barely hear the wind on Mars
with my human ears doesn’t mean
the wind wouldn’t flip up my skirt. So many forces
just beyond our senses have powerful effect—
like the words that just today I didn’t hear you say,
yet I know by the way my skin shivers they’re true.
I know, just as sure as the wind blows on Mars,
it takes just one gust to make a thousand seeds go flying.
And I am a weed with ten thousand seeds.
And those words I didn’t hear today, they’re the wind.
Spell for Ending Well
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ending, silence, spell on December 7, 2020| 5 Comments »
Who’s ever heard
of a silent spell?
Isn’t it supposed to rhyme?
Shouldn’t it contain
the eye of something,
the tail of something else,
some leaves, some poison,
a cauldron, a fire,
and a whole lot of stirring?
But this spell can’t be manufactured.
All it wants is your attention.
All it wants is for you to feel
how it feels to end.
It wants you to lean
into loss and let it do
its slow work on you.
It doesn’t offer a magic word—
no word is magic enough
to do what must be done.
Which is to trust
the vanishing nature of things.
Which is to let the body
grasp and grasp and grasp
until at last it is ready
to release. Any spell
for ending well
knows its own uselessness.
It knows the importance
of silence. It knows
that anyone who would look up
a spell for ending well
already has exactly what they need.
Suggestion for a Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, division, kindness, silence, speaking on November 3, 2020| 4 Comments »
And if today we speak at all,
let us speak in golden leaf.
Let’s converse in low clear stream,
whisper in rose-hip pink.
And if we speak at all today,
let’s slip mulch between each word,
aware that what we say will grow—
how powerful the words we sow.
And if we speak at all,
let’s speak in mountain, speak in field,
speak only words that lift and heal,
speak only words that lift and heal.
And if we speak,
let’s listen for the quiet in between—
plant tulip bulbs in the silences.
And crocuses. And grace.
And any words with thorns in them,
let’s set them down. Let’s lose them.
And if our words don’t open like sky,
let’s let the sky do all the talking.
Gift
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gift, silence on September 5, 2020| 2 Comments »
I’m sure there’s a blossom in there somewhere
And if all I can give you is silence,
then let it be the most beautiful silence,
a silence perfumed with mint and sage,
a silence that brings a quiet shine
to everything it touches.
Let it be the kind of silence
that opens into a deeper silence,
the kind that knows golden petals and sunshine
and the scent of rain unfolding in the meadow—
a silence that holds you so lightly,
the way candlelight might hold you
inside the dark. May it find you
in the morning, be waiting for you
before you rise. May you find it behind
and between every word you say,
the way sky supports the dark cursive
of starlings. And may you hear it, really hear it,
the deep silence. Like your favorite
song playing over and over again.
One Silencing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blank, quiet, silence on August 28, 2020| Leave a Comment »
What’s in a Long Pause?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apology, communication, pause, silence on August 13, 2020| 6 Comments »
A rumor platoon.
A secret room.
A flying trapeze.
The honeyed moon.
A grapefruit pucker.
A slick river otter.
A compound fracture
and a safety measure.
The carrot peeler
and the apple tree,
the truth, the lie,
the apology.
One Illumining
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged moon, night, silence on June 27, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Waiting for the Trill
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged be here now, birds, red wing blackbird, silence, waiting on May 1, 2020| 3 Comments »
Just a few steps from the house
I find a place to sit on a rock
and wait for the trill of the red wing blackbird.
I have waited twenty years to hear it here
in my back yard full of water and willows
and quiet. All day, though intermittent, I’ve heard it.
Funny how much I enjoy the waiting tonight—
perhaps because I know that eventually
the bright call will come. It is, perhaps, like a girl,
waiting through her first date for her first kiss—
she’s pretty sure it will happen, and now, after
years of waiting, she suddenly has
all the time in the world. In fact, the waiting
is delicious—like champagne, dry, with tiny bubbles.
Like summer’s first raspberries—a little too tart,
and yet sweet enough to eat another and another.
I sit in the goldening world and wait and wait.
I listen to the jays as they squawk and the warbler’s
sharp chirp. The wind teases my hair and I wait
until I forget I am waiting, simply noticing the world.
By the time I hear the familiar trill, it greets me
like the old friend it is, then it’s silent again.
The way the sun seems most lovely just before it’s gone,
that’s how the silence holds me.
Nada
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged music, nothing, silence, stillness on February 29, 2020| 4 Comments »
written at the Carmelite Monastery in Crestone, CO
It holds everything, silence,
offers itself as a blank staff
on which every song is written—
the tiny hymn of insect wings,
the baritone of the jet as it flies
from one measure of sky to the next,
the dry requiem of rustling grass,
the emphatic chorus of crow.
How generous, silence,
am I willing to know it?
How it includes even the cough,
the belch, retching, the wailing,
the snarl, the scream, the shatter,
and scores these in concert with the hum,
the lush purr, the whisper of the lover,
the ecstatic tremulo of sigh.
There is no sound it refuses to hold.
Its patience is infinite.
So when we, like weary pilgrims,
tired of hearing the percussion
of our own footsteps, arrive at its doors,
silence receives us, welcomes us home.