Seeing friends for the first
time after his death
tested the silence a room could hold, the rest
was a kindness like holding our breath.
My wife's oldest friend
offers her best
brave smile, tells us about the first time
her daughter, in new hearing aids, passed a nest.
Pitched as high as a tin
wind chime,
in a sphere beyond the rumble of speech
she only knew "tweet" from what mother had
mimed.
But birds' hunger songs
seemed as far from reach
as the angels Blake saw perched in a tree,
and sweeter than any science her mother could teach.
Quick lips make it easy to
misread a speaker,
and once at a party, based on what she had seen,
the girl introduced her mother as a "silence
teacher."
Grief's small hands cupped
before me,
reliving the news of our infant son's tests,
his brain as quiet as her soundless sea,
and as still as winter in a robin's nest,
I did not say: I was the one
who held him last
and heard the ticking heart stop in his chest
or what that silence taught, and how it pressed.