To build a house on a mountain,
I find a place in my room where a cloud meets my eye.
Capture the wind with my lips.
Take notice of a bird writing eloquent script
across the sky.
Flickering in the morning yellow,
Aspen leaves turning somersaults,
Dark, light, dark, light.
A moon and its negative
Multiplied by a thousand.
A cosmos of arboreal splendor.
Spring green beckoning me –
Shyly into the somber quiet of the wood.
Where do I put a memory of silence?
I carve a groove just deep enough,
And delicately place the wedge of delicious
Extravagant emptiness
Inside the fissures.
Protected and preserved I forget the silence is there
Until it has mischievously flown away,
Like the birds I saw that morning –
Writing their indecipherable messages across the paper
I sadly allowed to float away.
Lynne Sachs