Silence on Deck

It's a quiet thing, the learning... how to live beside a wrong, how it asks so little of you — just a look the other way, and the first time costs you something, and the tenth time costs you nothing, and by now I couldn't tell you... what I've paid.

There was always someone singing on the dog watch, off the key. Now the bell on every half hour drops like something down a well, and I know the way a man goes mute is the way this ship's gone silent — not at once... but by agreement. No one rang it. No one fell.

Sing to me, my love, any tune... any line. The ship's gone still as Sunday and I can't recall your voice tonight.

You don't lose yourself in storms, love... you lose yourself in calms, in the small consents, the swallowed words, the mornings you don't ask, till the silence isn't something that the ship is doing to you — it's a thing you help her carry. It's a watch you've learned to stand.

And nobody's been brawling, no one's flush with lovely lying, all the girls they knew in Lisbon gone unsaid... like they're ashamed, and God keep the ship that's quiet, for a quiet crew's afraid — and the frightened and the faithful can look terribly the same.

Even the dog's gone dumb there at the bow... won't be called to eating, watching something on the water that he will not turn to name, and I caught myself at morning, lying still and barely breathing, listening for your breath, love... like the listening could save.

I used to think a soul was something taken all at once — some grand theft in the dark... some single unforgivable. It's not. It's slow. It's Tuesdays. It's the manifest unread. It's a man who keeps his heading... while the quiet fills his bed.

I have nothing to report you... and the nothing is the trouble, for a ship is made of noises — and I don't know what this is. The engine holds. The glass is high. Everything is well aboard... except for everything.

Sing to me, my love... any tune... any line. Sing to me. Sing to me.

Cold as the wake out in the strait, dark as the night without the stars — sing to me, I'll soon forget that I am yours.

Long as the line tied to the anchor, short as a life adrift at sea, quiet as the hold with men asleep — you are my breath, you are my belief.

And I'm set adrift, I'm reeling in the deep of tangled sheets, yes the darkness has me feeling you are my belief, you are my everything. You are my belief. You are everything. You are everything.