I used to think that silence was when we first touched and my fingers skimmed your back as gently as snowfall and you told me that it felt like you had grown wings
most mornings i woke for you and i wish i wouldn’t have kept quiet about the graceful way your arms were placed and the complex pattern the rumpled sheets left on your face when you turned over to kiss me good morning
I used to think that noise was when we ran home in the downpour squealing like children and you dropped the groceries down the stairwell cans crashing onto concrete thudthudthud of grapefruits and oranges and you drove me to the wall and stole my lips like you were starving
noise was fighting just to make up and dragging our problems around the room like empty cans tied to a bumper
silence was you perched like stone on your windowsill when you spoke your poetry in solemn glowing tones and in the air around you dust circled and danced like tiny pirouetting stars and the light from the hollow moon made you into a ghost
silence was the cone that surrounded us whenever we’d talk how I was drunk on the lines in your face etched in by hundreds of thousands of open-mouthed smiles
I used to believe that noise was when together we laid in your empty room and filled it with my closed-eyed uhs and your open-eyed mmms and we were drowning and we never came up for air
but noise is the thunder of keeping thoughts inside
i had love for you hidden in places where i couldn’t even retrieve it tucked deep into the hollows of my bones and in the spaces between my eyelashes
silence was the way you could glance at me in a room full of people and make them all disappear it was how you ignored the extra weight I carried here
and here
and loved me
it was the space between passion and absence the way neither of us could say anything because the air between us was so filled with hope
and noise was the shattered space you left the tremors of deceit the tentative scratching at windows and the desperate pounding on doors
but we didn’t have anything between the silence and the noise no plateau, no solid ground, no polished stone no patch of grass to land on
and then you were gone and I remembered what silence was