I wrote an ode
to reticence, my habit
of perfection. The held
and holding word,
its wetting tract is not,
as Hopkins said, renunciation
but a space, I think
for coiled sound to shift.
It’s like a net.
Are reticence and silence one?
Reticle (or reticule)
means satchel, purse,
a woven clutch to keep
the daily things no longer kept
in pockets. And it means sighting,
too: crosshair. Held again,
this time in distant, urgent
threat. To see to hunt.
Spectral, haptic sight,
those lines. The eye is throne
or snare. And other nets will speak
in other ways: the veins
across my retina recite
to ophthalmologists
I couldn’t wait, my summoning
was pressure-point massage, was
brimming moon.
Their fuller curl, prevented
by my early birth (wettish-lunged
and burning blue),
just stops. Unlike a reticence,
the thing I call my quiet.
Under-slumber, buckle
my mouth is.
And was it good,
to be this way and not
be known? It’s like a net.
I wrote it down.