saying what cannot be put in words
his hands warm and strong and kind
have their own mood and vocabulary;
inside the most imperceptible of
gestures is a soft summery breeze
that in sweeping aside my hair
holds and envelops me

yet there is a silence in his eyes
a silence in which I see an inner man
developing features, as negatives do in
hypo-bath, whose look pierces and
unshuts even if the opaque door behind me
is heavy and tall as masonry

i have encountered nothing before that matches
this wild tenderness at the heart of solitude
wherefore i let it roll forth and back outwards
so its texture and complexity
walk into my head like a stranger through the
streets and patterns of town

it is hard to say how he speaks or
how he does not only something in me
appreciates the action in the unsaid and
absorbs it the way i do poetry —
none, not even the wind of this world,
has a deeper more eloquent voice