“Whose silence are you?” After Thomas Merton The single eye of the sun long shut, world deep asleep like a sunken ship loaded with treasures, full moon’s fierce shadows illumine the way for miles, stars glint like coins dropped to the well’s black bottom, last apple fallen from the tree in a slush of honey and crimson. I walk barefoot across wet grass, night’s questions relentlessly wrestling in my mind’s knotted weave. I look for answers written by salmon in the stream, or a snail’s slither of streaming silver. I prostrate myself at the gnarled foot of the ash tree.