Silence

a poem by Roger B Rueda

It is like water filling each fissure of stones or earth,
or even the holes of our skin. When it leaves,
only then do we know that it was there
as it leaves a memory of synchronisation
and strangeness
of being verbal, of knowing
that we are not by ourselves
in the midst of this home where the end
is the start and the start is the end,
like a helm spinning round.
We can walk out on through it as it doesn’t bear
all: it is the god of reticence
and surreptitiousness,
it is the god which knows everything, but,
perhaps has silence of itself
whose life ends
when it is broken or vanishes when heard.
It is it when we can only plumb its deepness
or sense or insight,
but through it we only
walk in the unknown and yet only it knows
that the truth is almost by it.
It can change everything, the truth,
maybe, for it is
as if an inconstant mechanism:
it has its form
but tends to be shapeless
as it is what it is, or who it is, I don’t know.
It is at the end of it that we can know the truth of it,
but only then when life doesn’t start or end
but finally admits to what we think of it or what it really is.