I like you quiet because it's as if you are absent

I like it when you’re quiet, it’s as if you weren’t here now,

and you heard me from a distance, and my voice couldn’t reach you.

It’s as if your eyes had flown away from you, and as if

your mouth were closed because I leaned to kiss you.

Just as all living things are filled with my soul,

you emerge from all living things filled with the soul of me.

It’s as if, a butterfly in dreams, you were my soul,

and as if you were the soul’s word, melancholy.

I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you’d gone away now.

And you’d become the keening, the butterfly’s insistence.

And you heard me from a distance and my voice didn’t reach you:

it’s then that what I want is to be quiet with your silence.

It’s then that what I want is to speak to your silence

in a speech as clear as lamplight, as plain as a gold ring.

You are quiet like the night, and like the night you’re star-lit.

Your silences are star-like, they’re a distant and a simple thing.

I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you weren’t here now.

As if you were dead now, and sorrowful, and distant.

A word then is sufficient, or a smile, to make me happy,

Happy that it seems so certain that you’re present.

Pablo Neruda, my favorite poet after the Almighty Shakespeare.