Ondine

To speak freely, I could never land on anything worth talking about
    but from the moment they shut me up, I’ve been full of things to say.
It’s not that the mind is tricking itself but that the mind itself is a trick
    played on silence by the body. You might imagine a cool black pond

completely devoid of moonlight, no stand of white pine framing it
    and an absence of the little ripples that pleat a pond’s still surface.
As for me, I can’t do it. I start stumbling only a few strokes in, incapable
    of imagining what isn’t there without planting it there by mistake.

If this is a crime, at least its wake is victimless, but even I can see
    it differs by degrees, and when speech is added to the mix, what isn’t
might be addressed as if it were, then all the sailors tuning in at sea
    end up clinging to what they hear as fact, when it’s actually in error,

or worse, misleading by design. Still, I find it strange that the pond
    was never intended to be an object of the mind’s perceptual activity
but a metaphor for the silence the body disturbs, although the more
    I give it thought, the more it slides into the mind itself, silently and still

abiding in the body, neither adding to nor taking away, until the body
    wants something it can’t quite reach, or needs what evanesces to stay,
and as its inner distance widens, deepens, I paddle across dark water
    to the pond’s inky center, where wave by wave a new reality is speaking.