this distance

The blue gesture,
this hand,
breaks the heart.

My own departure
separates
the glass, old friend.

All of life
encompassed, contained, surrounded.
The blue sea
the perfect ice berg.

I looked across
two rooms, separated
in size, in shape, in velocity.

the silence after the car stops

The silence after the car stops (if there is silence),
I have heard it three times:

Once when I was fifteen years old and I had just completed a one hundred and eighty degree turn in the dark night on a narrow road in less than a second after steering the Dodge Dart out of a ditch I had careened into while reaching onto the floor of the back seat to grab a glass bottle that was clanking against a hard piece of metal. When the car came to a rest facing the direction in which I had come, it was silent.

Once in Iceland when the road became clay slip and relinquished its hold on foreign bodies such as me and my passenger and our small white rented car and the twist and the turn and the blind summit and the blinding sweep of the majestic mountain and the sign with the exclamation point all became fine reasons to stop driving and get out of the car. Surrounded by rocks and miles from nowhere, standing still and listening; I did not cry.

And once in The Passenger, the film by Antonioni, in which Jack Nicolson, young and thin and not making that grin, stopped his car in the middle of an African desert surrounded by vast mounds of fine sand, creamy in the distance, dunes of sand, beautiful, saffron, cruel. He can’t go on. He doesn’t know how. He stops, he gets out, and he looks into the distance. And nothing makes a sound because there is nothing. There is no sound of the wind whistling through something. The sun beating down is silent.

In each case the silence is a great relief.