The silence in pieces

We wait for the sun to be joined
by other suns, we ready ourselves
with maps to draw the emerging lights,
the meteor showers draw faint lines
on the faces of young children.

We lick up the light that falls
from a tented sky, we are babies
in bed together, shivering with warmth,
grasping fingerless after bedsheets
in a young woman's hand.

And we lie underneath the constant
removals, letting the sheet
slide away and a nakedness
covers everything. And she smiles,
she is part of a fever that breezes
over the whole earth, all our surfaces.

We stand together in a crumbling corner
where everything else has been torn asunder
and formed a radiant, unlikely triangle.
And dress ourselves sloppily under
the light that remains, and dress ourselves
again and again to stand in the same position.

The light that moves over the hill
becomes the hill. The glow from reflecting planets
disintegrates whole libraries of conversation,
here on the surface, in an area that has been named.
We mouth the words at each other that no one
can bear to speak.