Letter to a Mute

If I could reach you now, in any way

At all, I would say this to you:

This afternoon I walked into a thicket

Of gold flowers that had no idea

What they were after. They couldn't hear a thing.

I walked among a million small, deaf ears

Breaking their gold into the afternoon.

I think they were like you, golden, golden,

Unable to express a single thing.

I walked among them, thinking of you,

Thinking of what it would be like

To be completely solitary. Once I was alone like that.

All the field was humming, brimming

With some brazen kind of song, and I

Thought that somehow I could disappear

Into the empty hall of your right ear,

Wandering through the slender bones of you.

But I knew that I could never let you know

That it is lame summer here, that I

Can hear the crickets every evening

Hollowing out the darkness at my window,

That you have vanished into a dark tunnel

Where I have tried to reach you with my mouth

Till my mouth ran gold, spilling over everything.

Tonight I looked into your face, tenderly,

Tenderly, but I can never find you there.

I can only touch your quiet lips.

If I could stick my pen into your tongue,

Making it run with gold, making

it speak entirely to me, letting the truth

Slide out of it, I could not be alone.

I wouldn't even touch you, for I know

How you are locked away from me forever.

Tonight I go out looking for you everywhere

As the moon slips out, a slender petal

Offering all its gold to me for nothing.

--Thomas James