Días de siléncio

Para un día de siléncio

a day of a certain silence:
not the stopping of mouths, but of gears
a day we could say
a dollar did not drive our cars.

where in the city a deep shudder runs
below the sidewalks and through pipes
through basements and buildings
and the stonemason’s hurled arms
or arms fitting seams into suits
or the worried pen of the salesman;
runs through the stillness of a house
like thunder trapped in the dishes
and pictures hung that wait to fall;
runs under the skin, in our lungs, the heavy
constant breath of industry;
a silence, too, to that.

a day when nothing fills the grayed stacks
of the grayed factories;
a day the city would be stone

~

for hours we might lean at our windows, expecting
the next sound

no electric voices to work the tongues
of our white bedroom walls

no click from the clocks we had stopped
to close the empty moment
we had forgotten how to live

we would lean at our windows
like hostages imagining the sun
had grown suddenly too large
that the wind had died

~

but soon a boy will lose his hat in a tree
laugh like the bells of Sunday noon
and two girls with songs rolled up in their hair
will find a place between the houses
between the sun and their shoes
to try their music;
the men who work in trucks
will no longer grumble at their lack of travel,
will deal hands beneath the cottonwoods;
and I will talk to the couple downstairs
who have been ghosts of their own footsteps

how a million strangers welcome themselves
to the shaded roads of villages

how the sun falls slower that day
behind the pedestrian circles

how the breeze borrows heat from the evening
the flowers close their red;
how a few doors swing gently to

how we find ourselves next to another
in the darkness surprised to remember
what it is we depend upon.

Minneapolis, 1987