In The Silence Of Pines Poem by Carlos Suarez

To the art of Li Huayi


I climbed slowly toward the high places where words were forgotten, where only a madman could stand so far from the fires in the hour of maledictions and presentments where history left the scars, the medals, the caresses and promises of despots and stranded lovers.

High up there where the air is never dry.

Where the full width of the sky may find the soul.

Where the reasons why men don’t sleep are lost in the reveries of those who can see it all as in a dream of rocks and moss... All the golden rooms and all the rivers, the leaves, the claws and wings of wars that shame the heart.

Where nobody else could hear that flute, that blood rushing through, that laughter.

There. There I knew I would come to love your silence of pines, your hands of lichens, your ancient voice of silky mist.

There I would open the book of your gestures and find the moment and the taste of my death, and I wouldn’t grieve or fear it.

How could I? Fear is a stranger to me since I surrendered this heart, this labyrinth, the four gated house of sorrows where burning axes had shown its deserted passages and abandoned rooms.

High up there I learned to laugh at your children of anger and their simple toys of darkness and abandonment.



And now I am back with all that silence to offer you these forgotten things, this taste of shadows found in the aura of those precarious trees taking hold in the crevices like secrets put away in a season of discord, because the heart whispers its words in the dark and forgets the names of those who count the stars before dawn arrives to the creeks where voiceless angels dream in the core of the stones.

And names keep growing. Layers of names I can’t remember as I can’t remember the names of the fossils, the graceful tenuous portraits of ancient fish and leaves printed on the rocks, the dead things of winter that existed before we were this race, this defiance, this thing we decide every morning at dawn and relinquish every night so we can hear the forgotten words of the gods talking to us from our dreams.