Silence is like a series of hyphens

like the darkness that night camping
along the Mississippi
I thought I was dead, and then
I heard wolves, and I retreated
to the car, to the comfort of plastic
seats, the radio, the flick of the lighter
anything to interrupt the space
like all those empty thoughts we need.

In a photograph from the next day
I am standing on a lavender hill,
a bluff overlooking the river
somewhere in Wisconsin,
looking as if the night before—
the dark silence, the wolves—
had been erased by orchestras.