After some silence, she confessed:
she was looking at a duck,
a "lucky ducky"
in the texture of her rough ceiling.
As she compared it to finding shapes in clouds,
I saw visions of a duck
with a cigar in it's bill.

All I could do was sit and be silent
and smile as she told me
about the armless bust
and the ice cream cone that she saw.
What I saw with my eyes was only darkness.
My light was out,
but the eyes inside my head
saw this woman lying
on her back with a knee
bent toward the ceiling,
her hand resting on her belly.

She traced anything she could find
and told me what she saw.
"A whale," she said.
I heard in her voice a spirit
of a little girl.  She told me
that she had been mapping
her ceilings since age four.

When I was four I remember
lying in a plain room with only two beds
and an eight-track player.
There was only one cartridge
that my little hands
would ever reach for.
It was the Star Wars theme.

I don't recall tracing
the ceiling textures or counting sheep
jumping over a fence one at a time,
I recall the deafening silence of the room
if I did not turn on the music.
How different am I now
when I have a soft bed
but I often sleep in the lumpy sofa
before my TV box
and fall asleep to the sounds
of Hollywood gunshots
and John Cusack?

The silence was not loud
for her.  No,
her ears were dormant
while her eyes were busy
scouring the rough of her ceiling
like the hands of a blind man
exploring a face.
"now I see a family," she said.

As I lay here with a phone to my ear
thinking of tracing, I could suddenly hear
every thump of my heart.
The air felt heavy
like that of a still morning
where each blade of grass
is covered with dew.
I took in this heavy air
and before I knew it,
I pushed the air
right back out in a deep sigh.

It was not a sigh of spilled milk or a lost child,
it was a sigh of gratitude
like that of a man stepping
into an air-conditioned house
from scorching hot day outside.
It was the type of sigh
that is always the companion of a smile.

I think that I could have fallen asleep
were I not trying to stay awake
because the silence was not loud
not with the sound of her breathing
or of her reciting the shapes she found.