THE SILENCES

1

Now you are back at your window,
Where you live in a strange city,
Now I no longer see you,
Your face is slowly forgotten,

As you are forgetting to watch me,
And I will forget to remember
How lately alike was our wanting,
That wanting which ends in hurting.

Wherever you where, your precense
Still clings to all things in absence;
There is also the pain of touching
What you touched without ever knowing,

And the trees hold the rain in silence
As the rain makes the birds stop singing;
In the sea is a pool where the pressure
Of your body still seems to be moving.

Your body is still and is moving,
As I remove from each mirror
The frost where your face was reflected,
As if coldness could be abstracted.

Silence is pain.You hear it
Most when you cannot bear it.
Tell me if you can bear it,
Far body and near spirit.

2


The air bears nothing on it.
No. But I saw this minute

You slowly move upon it;
Then there was light within it.

I see it now longer,
That light when late we linger

Upon the shore, the distant
Sun growing less persistent,

The moon being  not quiet  present,
And the stars still evanescent.

3

Trance I have loved so surely,
Surely you naked branches have me,
I who have loved your comely
Body of branches moving toward me,

Nightly to sleep so safely
Even the pang of others dreaming
Comes over distance faintly,
That is to bee less lonely, only

What is  there still rearming
The arms I take up in the dark,
The olive branch extending
Into an arrow`s  pointed ending ?

4


Moonlight is half of sleep
And the keepsake of the deep.

I plunge into sleep`s sure crater,
Slowly it fills with water.

Your hands that can never reach me,
How all of their labors touch me !

Weeping at their occasions,
The seasons turn the seasons,

A sound not unlike the ocean`s

5

The inward pleasure of water edges
Drifts as the shifting color battens
On dead wood, filling the golden pockets
Of fall with the falling brown detritus
Of unloved leaves as my eyes go serching
For faces among the stain of the going
Wood on an island filled with the samples
Of revived and reviving underpinnings,
Whose death under white fall soon is coming
But to rise up again in greening
Time. And, in time, the dead start growing.

6

Now I am back at my window,
Where I live in a strange city,
Now you no longer see me,
My face is slowly forgotten,

And the tree hold the rain in silence,
As the rain makes the birds stop singing;
My body still seems to be moving
That  wanting which ends in hurting.


HOWARD MOSS