Though I have not seen you for several years, after hello we descend into silence like cornfields under a falling snow, a silence too dark for me to speak into for fear that nothing will answer. The only thing that seems solid is this chair whose arms I grip. Yours is not the forgetful tongue of old age, but a lifelong commitment. What reserve did the western Iowa wind burn into your skin as a boy that it welded your lips shut? Blood-brother to silence stubborn as bluffs by a river, words break from you grudgingly, fragment by fragment, from rock that yields slowly to erosion.
Our voices absent, isolated sounds magnify: a passing car, groans from the next room, the clock ticking. Uncle Lee, before your stone tongue dissolves, let go of your words.
by John Freeman
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