The Silence She Paints In…

She sits the way a harbor sits,
holding the light, asking nothing of it.
Her hair, sand spilled from a slow dune,
falls past her shoulder in a warm brown hush,
and she tilts her head, and smiles,
and the room rearranges itself
to be worth her looking at.

Blue eyes. Not cold,very deep.
The blue of a page before the first stroke,
before the first lie of light.
She blinks and something is decided.
She blinks again and it is kept.

What passes between us is not speech.
It is the wide and careful nothing
that lovers learn to live inside,
the held breath of a corridor,
the whole conversation of a door left open.
Everything said. Not one word spent.

And so she works,
because the brush is the only mouth
that can hold that much.

Her kind are divers.
Down where the soul goes ocean
and the colors stop being names,
she goes with a lamp and a steady wrist,
and she comes back up with the truth in her teeth,
dripping, gorgeous, half alive,
and lays it on the linen to be seen.

The muses did the committing.
She does the carrying.

Look at her, silent, smiling, sand haired,
swaying her head like a metronome
keeping time for a music only she hears
and tell me beauty is not a kind of force,
that grace is not a thing that pushes men
uphill, forward, past themselves.

She never says a word.
She doesn't have to.
She has already said it
in a language the lovers of the deep
have always spoken fluently,
and will speak again
the moment anyone
deserves to hear it.