Nights when silence gathers
and my old conversation with it
stutters toward a beginning,
usually people are talking
who have no silence in them
and so can leave no mark.
I let it wash over me then.
I say the nothing it hears.
To make the place you live
a vacant place, where nothing happens –
this is how things come to you.
But I do not trust silence
as the saintly do. Sometimes
it smells of its own power
and the dead and the unborn.
I’m turning up the stereo now.
I’m banging a fork against a glass.
Silence loves the moments just after;
its favorite part of a story is the end.
And I, who’ve so often betrayed it,
wish to please it as much as I can.
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