SILENCE AND POETRY

I'm getting ready to go on a silent retreat, so I turn to poetry to quiet the soul in preparation. Here's a poem by Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth, from his bilingual collection of the same title:

LOOKING FOR THE HORSE LATITUDES

(after the painting Rooms by the Sea by Edward Hopper)

Something unseen weighs heavy.

on the resilience of the mind.

The usual apparitions

have all been exorcised.

The sea that seemed at first

to hesitate has come

at last into the rooms

leaving in the dark a wedge of light.

It's there -somewhere-

a spectral springboard

from which one might jump

into the sea.

and yet drown in the sky?

Or else fall to the ocean floor

where unconfessed anxiety

can find oblivion?

So many things are heard

and yet are never said.

What solitude! What endless prize

of isolation that is not,

surprisingly, bereft!

Such silence can be seen.

It begs response and scatters

glimmers of reflection.

Here lies the telltale vacancy,

the vacant compass.

The emptiness that lures and cries

with mirror-like precision,

the essence that absorbs all substance,

inverted vision turned aright

past the axiometer's reflection.

Could one fall into color

and dissolve in sheer liquidity?

Is space the pure and primal

ruler of our eye,

so that no surge can lead

to anywhere but there,

to preordained discovery?

Those people, yes, the crowds

who are not here, they are so lonely

they crave the mystery

that can present the future of the past.

They are so lonely, and thus a door

has been left open quietly

that they and we and all can gaze

into the sound and some day,

when weary of the walls of time,

set sail and ride the wind toward the night.

I think my soul is now more alert than ever...