Silences

I can barely remember, now, that unwritten poem in which

you suddenly appeared, and which disappeared

the way your Mohawk fathers disappeared from the valley

I lived in once. I have only these words that seem as if

they climbed up from the bottom of a dry well. There are

so many things we don’t hear: the hawk’s talon piercing

the skull of the meadow vole, the moon scratched by a branch

of the hackberry, the cicada emerging from its cocoon in

this false Spring. I am told that when I was young I watched

a butcher push his hand down the throat of a lamb’s carcass

and pull out its heart. Can you imagine a silence so desperate

to be heard? You said once we should be able to hear

the language of fish, that everything comes to us on rivers

of wind. John, the news has come that your own bones are

turning into water, and I look out to the birds that have come

to the railing and can’t even remember their names. Just there,

an early lily is trying to hold the morning’s rain in the mirror

of its petal. Where I live now, someone has cut away acres

of trees, and the words for what they meant no longer exist.

I am wearing the choker of bone you left for me.

I don’t know what that unwritten poem should have said,

though I remember the image of coffins they have found

in the desert, shaped to take the place of those bodies that have

dissolved into air, and of the Antarctic ice sheet that is

floating towards the sea across invisible, submerged lakes.

Last week, the cranes arrived, as they do each year,

at the Cherokee campsite on the Hiawassee. When they rose

in groups to settle for the night by the river, their necks

leaned into the sunset as if they were in a rush to leave their bodies

behind. It is this way with everything we try to say. We want

to grasp the heart, to hear what is beyond our hearing, but have

only these words that disappear like mist from the tip

of a wave, or the phosphorous trail a swimmer leaves in the sea.