Happening Apart from What's Happening Around It

There is a vividness to eleven years of love

because it is over. A clarity of Greece now

because I live in Manhattan or New England.

If what is happening is part of what's going on

around what's occurring, it is impossible

to know what is truly happening. If love is

part of the passion, part of the fine food

or the villa on the Mediterranean, it is not

clear what the love is. When I was walking

in the mountains with the Japanese man and began

to hear the water, he said, "What is the sound

of the waterfall?" "Silence," he finally told me.

The stillness I did not notice until the sound

of water falling made apparent the silence I had

been hearing long before. I ask myself what

is the sound of women? What is the word for

that still thing I have hunted inside them

for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,

the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still

in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper

down where a woman's heart is holding its breath,

where something very far in that body

is becoming something we don't have a name for.