Silence, Break

There are some things that you learn & do not

speak on & then there are those that you learn

Not to speak on. The gravel of troubled water

does not make a sound. Song does not punctuate

Or deny me grief. One woman whom I loved

was always begging for mercy in her old age.

Cursing, hawking up a storm of mucus & blood

that could be heard from anywhere in the house,

At any time of day. Her usual greeting was a petition

for good favor, blistered with god-fearing conviction

& her cold hand across my face. I did pray, but never

on my knees, or by her shrine, or by myself.

I never figured that her illness was my tragedy

to mourn, & so when she groaned that no one

Ever came to check on her, I chose silence,

the familiar shrinking of fear for a false solace,

for the chance to stay out of the way of her seasonal wrath,

& when she upheaved her body out of bed in the morning,

I never dared to ask if she needed something small from me

To ease the toil, the loneliness, mammoth in the room

mocking me upfront for letting the past be the past.

After my family found the body, lying there lifeless for what

could have been days or hours, we turned to demolition

as the first instinct. No examiner, no autopsy ever performed.

Her house unskulled to plain wreckage, material cartilage

& we wept, not for what we didn’t say but what we couldn’t know.

Still, nobody knows for certain what killed her, bu

we all saw what preyed on her. We saw

Back then & stayed in our everturning worlds.

There’s a difference between ignorance & silence, they say—

One is bliss. Assured, sweet-sounding as a neighbor’s humming.

The other, denial that feels like a small sacrifice: to lay down

the memory, possessed by all the things I could have said &

all the condolences I could have given, the walls had to

cave, our secrets taken to their own little graves.