Contact with others is what heals,
what sickens, the sun
encircled by the lonely planet
of ourselves, caught in the orbit
of the light or shadow as they draw
their heat toward us or away, as if we were
the dust kicked up by some other existence, the wake
churned at the source, the indissoluble bond we were supposed to renounce
but which awoke again each time we loved
another body. You hoped I’d write the words
that can do what music does:
step through the silence without harming it, be
part of it, and of the things that can’t be said,
the things we can’t even approach without
them darting away from us. I told you there’s nothing
like music but touch
and being touched, the particles
that meet and fuse and sometimes scrape against each other and
cause pain, and pull away, sometimes one explodes
inside the other, because there’s neither surface
nor interior: the inside is the same as out.

Claudia Masin, “The Silent Touch”, in Intact, translated by Robin Myers