I
wanted, I thought, only a little,
two
teaspoons of silence—
one
for sugar,
one
for stirring the wetness.
No.
I
wanted a Cairo of silence,
a
Kyoto.
In
every hanging garden
mosses
and waters.
The directions of silence:
north, west, south, past,
future.
It comes through any window
one inch open,
like rain driven sideways.
Grief shifts,
as a grazing horse does,
one leg to the other.
But a horse sleeping
sleeps with all legs locked.
— Jane Hirshfield
