There is nothing but the murmur of your breathing, the moonlight
spreading its luminous light cutting through the darkness across the
white sheets. I am the keeper of the silence. You, Sarah, are the
keeper the sensuous. Now you sleep, but gently I begin by kissing
lightly your forehead, so lightly you do not move. I kneel on the bed
beside you gazing at your long, flaxen hair that the generous, silver
moon graces with its silver streams. There is nothing wrong with
silence or the darkness of the the rest of the room, a chiaroscuro by
the ghost of Giotto. I slowly pull the white sheet from your shoulders
to below your knees without awakening you, a panoply of pulchritude.
With only my eyes, I touch you. I am enraptured. In silence and darkness
and silver streams, there is no time. I am the keeper of silence, an august
post, more regal than any throne, any crown. Sleep, dear Sarah, as long
as you wish, for there is no time when we are at the epicenter of love.
Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet, an essayist, a writer of aphorisms, a novelist, and a human-rights advocate his entire adult life.
