What will I find if I stop searching?

The silence stays close, a shadow. I don’t 
mean the kind without form or sound. 
More cloak or armour, its texture 
changing: corrosive, calloused, molten, 
foul like maggots in the carcass of 
another time, cold and solid like ice 
cubes, the last memory of warmth 
frozen out of them. 

It sits with me at dusk, offering 
words. Translating bird and star 
and leaf and wind. How much is 
redacted, how much wrong, how 
much not worth telling? The flower, 
I realize, speaks with no awareness 
of its colour. 

I feel the hush on my back 
as the light shifts. All there is, 
is this ordinariness of being. 
The extraordinary, when it 
comes, is so immeasurably
small, so painfully personal 
that language refuses 
to contain it. 

The silence softens, expanding 
into a grey mist, wrapping 
around house and wound and 
night. What else is there besides
this? What else was meant to be? 
What will I find if I stop searching?
The moon slips down, to see, to 
hear, to keep vigil.

I think of salmon, homing in 
on their natal river, swimming 
upstream. Some journeys have 
a design beyond the traveller. The 
moon sighs, with no perception 
of its light. Silence morphs gently
into a wet wind.

#Poetry