Stone is silent, and the face of the moon in its phrases. The sanctuary lamp is silent at St Paul’s, St James’s. The dead are silent, and the athletic field under its layer of snow. The plaque for Lt Buzzell in Buzzell Field is eloquent in its silence. My kitchen is silent when I lie asleep, no one in and out of there, grabbing sandwiches, making coffee. Shame is silent. Shock is silent, often. God is silent, assuming God exists.

The dead leaf frozen in an iced-over puddle on the rim of Spy Pond: that leaf is silent. The orchestra is silent before the conductor lowers her baton. I tell myself that the bud as it unfolds, the grassblade as it pushes through wakening earth, these things are silent. But perhaps they speak a language that I cannot hear. The cloister of a Cistercian monastery is reputed to be silent, but monks have been known to whisper among themselves. The statue of Mother Mary, prodigiously expectant, that stands in the lower church of the Franciscan shrine at Arch Street: she and the enwombed Child are silent.

The boy that is not confident is silent. The apology caught in the throat of one paralyzed by remorse: also silent. The photographs of relatives, the painting by cousin Sue of a seascape in Chatham: one doesn’t hear the familar palaver, nor the sounds of the advancing waves. Poets are silent until we read their words. Love can be silent, because all words diminish the holy emotion.