Reading at silvacane

Literary Review, Spring, 2004 by Rita Signorelli-Pappas

Reading at Silvacane

In the silence she sits in a cloister reading. Her lips do not move.
Her gaze touches print like the sun skimming clouds.
A man wanders through the colonnade. He keeps moving.
She feels the set of his mouth, the tilted head, the taut hips.

Once a community of monks read here; a voice led them
through meals to Compline. Now she follows as the voice
leads her down the page; once read, the lines singe
and flute into smoke. Words disappear that way--
they vanish like shadows from the lime-washed walls.
Men disappear too when women keep them from moving.

Her hands do not move because they are veiled in words
steeped in silence to the core. As she listens, she can
hear the rhythmic strokes of a pen on parchment
(now fast, now slow) and she loses herself in the dark
swaying rows of lines (now thick, now thin).
The text erases; the silence floats, waiting to be read.

The monks at Silvacane did their tasks and prayed. At day's end
they sat on benches to chant psalms or they simply listened
to the voice of a reader reverberating through the room.
That voice recited through their nights and days as they
walked from one place to another--it moved them forward
slowly at one time until they became a single
melody reflected in cool, translucent glass.

Now the man sits alone on a bench inside the colonnade.
His most painful task is to touch her--nothing will change that.
His stillness is a path through which she enters the folded page.
A voice rises, syllables begin to crackle and burn
as a hand moves, assembling images on a screen:
the pulpit where a monk speaks in air dry as glass,
the cloister where a woman reads to find the miracle.