Quietly I'll Slip Away

I’ll sit in the silence and crave what it holds
A vast, indiscernible mystery
I watch the twilight lengthen in darkness,
The softness of the sky meld into the deep blues only seen for a moment
And for once I wish the twilight would stay
And I wouldn’t feel the large darkness that the many points of distant starlight seek to illuminate
In this quiet house I’m the only one breathing
The only one who craves the ticking and echoing of a clock in the stillness
It’s only in such a deep silence that I can truly feel myself think
That I can run words and jumbled thoughts into pictures and landscapes, strung like a ribbon across a heart in love with thickened silence
But such is only to be grasped and never held
How can the mass of human population be content to rush about and worry so
Is their conscience too weighted for them to listen to the silence, listen to their own heart – listen for God’s voice
And so they look in the reflection of a dimly illumined glass and despise what they see and shrink from what can only take a still and quiet heart to hear
I look in that glass
And I see a girl
A girl with long curls draped like a robe over her shoulders
Fathomless eyes of the depths of the richest tree, longing to hear the silence, see the crocus, feel the Winter’s breath
I see a face, although blotched with imperfection, clear, different, still
But the part that I cannot see is the part closest to me
It’s the part I long to understand, long for it to see and hear all it can
It beats with palpitations, but so imperceptibly that I cannot feel like this body owns a living pulse
It’s no use to ask me what I feel
I only long
I know not for what
Or when or where or how
I only see the window
And as I see myself in the reflection, so I am
I may be tangible to your eyes, your arms, your heart,
But to myself I’m just a reflection
Not even in a looking glass
I see right through my hair, my lips, my eyes, my hands
To the ground beneath the window
The shafts of grass that quiver in the midnight air
The leaves strewn carelessly by the wind upon the ground
The silhouette of the dead trees, after they’ve been stripped of all their autumn leaves
Faintly I see myself
And quietly I’ll slip away.