The Silence of Words

As a girl I was told that it was better to

sit in silence—because I was a girl, so

I sat in silence as a girl.

 

        Not to be denied, I knew my creative power,

made a box of words that in curvaceous moments

pulled muscle cars from the past that drove

me along in perfect seeing silence. Those who made

me mute may as well have written an obituary of rocks.

 

They did not understand that my multi-colored

        leggings gave tread to my wanderings

where I would someday embrace the PTSD, love

the past ripped pains.

 

        In my hush I saw that most men would have

an Ithaca-moment, that metallic lingerie was nothing

but a subversion of surfaces withholding encrypted love,

        that their glass gears, confectioned cogs

prevented them from ever knowing an intimate,

perfect tension,

from seeing that from an off-center equator

Venus went gliding by, transiting the sun, making

of love scented inflammations.

I sat in silence with my box of words, as a

girl in silence, because I was a girl, and knew

centuries’ afterburners

where they only knew small gods whining

in their heads. When they talked they said

nothing—

        could not gain immortality from the

underworld, but I learned, in my silence,

of a fire-crowned seduction

sighed out by breath of the dead-young.

 

I mounted syncretism’s secrets, learned of

snakes that fondle prayer beads,

        spied a lake of ice on the moon where

dead skaters glide, plucked out the mystery,

for this is where Van Gogh painted,

        where Stravinsky composes modern melodies

still, the place where the Alps are eating the oceans

and Josephine Baker taught Eve’s black moves.

 

        These things smiled at me from my box of

words, where I sat in perfect silence, as a girl,

moving toward that day when I would be a woman.

 

 

--Ralph Monday