Silence

When sleep dressed you in nakedness,
I held my ear by your full breast
To hear your heart, but could hear
Nothing: for a moment nothing
Lived, and in this silence I felt
Elsewhere your pain pulsing.
It grew and diminished
To lose itself in
Other pains.

My fingers groped for your fingers
And found the blankets, as you
Turned talking to the dreams in
A language of the world that
Released you, yet sometimes
Telephones.

I looked at your face
In the night’s quivering light:
That moment’s lethal silence
Had imprinted itself on your
Still lips.

Outside a station snored,
A train screeched and sighed.
A metal voice that whanged
The darkness declared an end
To all pereploi.

The silence matured
Around me, between us,
Forbidding me to touch
The whole of you:
And then your old blunt words
Would stab me.

In the morning, when your
Eyelashes brush the silence off,
You will see a blood-written,
Suicidal poem.