I was reading John Cage’s Silence in my garden
as the sun went down, drinking coffee and wondering
what this landscape would look like in twenty years,
after the ocean had risen, and where we’d be living then,
if we were living at all, when a woman
I’d never seen before stepped out my back door,
smiling, walked over, and asked if I’d seen
her garden shears, she wanted to trim things
a little for the party. So I smiled back and told her
I had no idea where anything was kept
these days. I must be getting old
I said and she laughed, which reassured me. So I listened
to the birds counting their feathers in the oak trees,
and soon a gaggle of boys with guitars
was wending its way through the garden, in costume,
singing in Spanish, about the sadness in their fruit.
So I began translating and humming along.
Tomorrow they would sing only about happiness,
they assured me, so I could turn back to reading
Silence, which had grown almost impossible to see
since the sun had gone down and the evening had turned chilly.
So I just sat there and imagined the words.