Quiet
Silence is never singular,
it has dialects,
territories,
weather systems of its own.
The silence before dawn is porous,
still learning its edges,
a word in the mouth
before the tongue decides.
The silence after loss is architectural
rooms rearranged by absence,
the specific gravity of an unmade chair,
a name that hangs in the throat
like a bell no one has struck.
The silence between old lovers has its own syntax:
a glance that carries forty years of freight,
the palm resting on a wrist saying everything grammar cannot hold.
And the silence I court here
the white space between intention and word
is the most dangerous:
it asks me to trust the not-yet,
to let the poem remain water before it learns the shape of whatever vessel I am.
These silences do not speak the same language.
They share only the name the way all thresholds share the name door,
and yet each one opens onto a different dark.
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