Silences

Are they passionless-----

The desert aridity after a gasp?

Some missile range behind

the temple's

detectable pulse---?  Are they?

Placing a probe, a sort of hand,

over air passages, facial pores, composed surfaces,

means finding sudden seismographic activity,

some Tsunami in close-up.

What a cosmos, what a bird

smashing glass

slowly and, also

paradox-----

the instinctive knife

that's a seal, the emissions

of tact, strength gilded

in reticence and, even, an eloquence

shared by fingers, telepathic, pulling away

while, somehow, remaining interlocked.

~~~~~ 

Went Still

Voices drew off,

that crowd an avalanche for Oscar Wilde's trial

or Lorca's last moments & then, from the other side,

a silence so vast vision itself became an entirely new sense -

for instance, those robins, redder-bellied than ever

on this February morn, the cold sun claiming

frost's amber communion in a rare air's burning

scented with clarity, Spearmint-pungent,

for leafless twigs no longer so stark

or lacking in hope that the taste of Spring

can be beginning again.