there is a silence in me, absolute and inconvenient

Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving 

or an emptying out? If the heart persists 

in waiting, does it begin to lessen? 

If we are always good does God lose track 

of us? When I wake at night, there is 

something important there. Like the humming 

of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations 

in the slums. There is a silence in me, 

absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted 

by the day I walked through the Greek village 

where everyone was asleep and somebody began 

playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside 

the upper floor of a plain white stone house. 

 

[Jack Gilbert {1925-2012} 'The Answer' from Collected Poems]