The Silence Artist
 
He began to speak less and less. And in his poems
he used fewer words than before, his silence growing,
the pages he wrote becoming emptier. At his readings
 
he would open the book and say “The pear…”
and then lapse into silence, the audience waiting
for the next word, becoming restless, shifting
 
in their chairs as the poem sailed on like a skier
who has just made a jump, the phrase coasting
through the quiet until he added “on the plate”
 
and his audience came to rest, their hearing landed at last
in the solidity of a finished thought. So it went,
his voice trailing away, his books filling with blank spaces
 
like heaps of blown snow. As time went on
this slow drift of nothingness became a blizzard;
in conversation he said very little, and his books
 
were sparse, their few words like stones placed
in a Zen garden. In Chicago he gave a reading
of twelve words; in Los Angeles he read five.
 
Finally in New York he gave a two-hour reading
that consisted only of the words “gentle” and “rhubarb.”
Some thought it was a joke, an elaborate gag
 
that he would soon bring to an end with a speech
that made fools of everyone; others thought
it was a profound and heart-felt statement
 
only deepened by repetition. The inevitable happened
during a radio interview, when he answered                   
the question “So, where do you get your ideas?”
 
by saying nothing at all. From then on he no longer
spoke, and his readings were events consisting
only of silence, absences in which the audience sat                           

transfixed, attentive; rituals in which a hundred people
sat breathing in a lighted room. Was it the being together
that was important? Was it the joy of listening
 
with others, as though part of a flock of birds
migrating in response to some unspoken instinct?
The media went on, the hustle and crush of magazines,
 
the blare of talk-shows and newspapers and websites.
Still he said nothing, and in his last years he gave
hundreds of readings in which large crowds assembled
 
only to listen to their own breathing, to the occasional
cough or sneeze, to the hum of fluorescent lights.
It seemed we had never listened this way before, never
 
been quiet enough to hear the rustle of a distant tree
in the wind, the flick of a lizard’s tail, even the dried
and lifted waters of the lake slowly gathering into cloud.
 
When he died his admirers said that now his poems
were everywhere, that they could hear them in the streets
and the fields and even in the rooms of busy restaurants;
 
they said his work would last forever, that it had become
part of eternity. And it was true that to many people
it seemed he was still present, onstage somewhere
 
in a forgotten town, reading a poem that had no end:
the blank book open on the podium, the audience
listening quietly, the author saying nothing at all.

                                                                  (from Miracle Atlas)