I.

And so I return to Jon Cage’s "Lecture On Nothing", where he declares: "The opposite and necessary co-existent of sound is silence.”

I listen to Cage to study the length of silence, to grow aware of my dynamic relation to it, how expectation generates tension, suspense, release. Cage notes that the four characteristics of sound include: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Of these four characteristics, only duration involves both sound and silence. To compose a piece based on durations (rhythmic: phrase, time lengths), for Cage, is a more accurate way of creating correspondence with the nature of the subject material. His argument against harmonic structure is based on its inaccuracy due to the fact that it is derived from pitch "which has no being in silence." 

Jon Cage's famous piece, 4'33", used silence as in composition, bringing various silences in dialogue with tones and chords through chance operations. His use of the I Ching as a sort of chance oracle, a divining rod for aleatoric music, relied on acceptance of the chance results. One cannot hold the divine holy only when it grants what we expected, or what we enjoy.

II.

Silence in poetry is not necessarily soundless. A laden-silence carries something inside it; this is thing it communicates without speaking. What is communicated may be heavy ("pregnant silence") or light and evocative ( "rich silence"), but a scene with a laden-silence is different from a silence-laden scene, where the silence is part of the entire backdrop, almost to the point of nonspecificity. 

In a silence-laden space, it can be difficult to distinguish the silences from what they carry—and that, of course, is why a writer creates a silence-laden scene which disorients the reader and adds tension. 

I want to look at the way Rodrick Minor uses silence in their poem, "Another Low Cut Fade Before the Quarantine," first published in American Poetry Review, where silence does the work of evoking a sort of supranatural emotional communion. Minor offers the reader a sort of sublime laden-silence which the poem touches, admires, and acknowledges. Narrated in first-person, the poet takes us through three lyrics stanzas describing the experience of being barbered. What's interesting is how much of the poem's emotion hinges on the relationship between the barber and the narrator--and yet, the barber is not named, not rendered intimate through personal naming, referenced only by pronoun – and this is fascinating--Minor uses a royal capitalized pronoun, a "He":

bloom a smile only for Him
pay Him for his loving
when the weeds cover my dahlias

perhaps this is how some men
say i love you silently

So much happens in these two ending stanzas. Notice how the poem's last word—"silently"—is an adverb that modifies a statement which is not said. By ending on silently, the whole poem gleams with that silence which the poet carefully defines as an assertion of love, a form of speech. 

Also notice how the capitalized pronoun combines with the work silence does to lay a sort of divine grace over the moment. The capitalized pronoun expands the individualistic focus on intimacy to include a Thou—to elicit the "Him" in a Thou-relation which honors the divine in the barber, thus expanding and thickening the idea of intimacy.

In this poem, or the way Minor uses it, silence designates an absence of speaking or verbal communication (I think we can hear the razors and the barbering tools in the background of the poem)  and it is this unspeaking this across intimacy that feels Divine in the space the poet creates. And the act of one man fading another. In the ordinary routine of the barber. In the luminous traces of trust that result in a particular form of not-saying.

III.

We have complex relationships with various silences—as well as the endings of silences. I’ve written about this in the context of libations, in the relations we hope to maintain with the invisible world.

And yet, there is something alarming and uncomfortable about the end of a silence at home. The sad buzz of a small plane nearby, the rumbling that falters until one's breath grows attached to an invisible wing, a sound reaching down from the sky—something you hope will continue, caught in your throat. The earthworm you want to see the other end of, the hope squirming inside it.

IV.

I go back to Ashley Jones’ poem, “What Lives in the If in Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful”, for how it rubs the conditional, and for how it reveals the role conditionals play in a poem or a song, which is to say, how the “if” touches silences or expands them, how it provides a particular space in which a silence can be spoken or described.