The elevator clanked like an old man coughing

as I got off at the eighth floor. My floor.

I’d attended a class, chomped a biscuit,

dissected the college paper. Been accosted by people, too,

for reasons I don’t remember. Some petition, maybe,

while the morning crowds began.

Back to my room now. Hopefully there

a scrap of peace. But then,

as I stepped through the swinging door to my corridor –

a hawk! I froze.

Three meagre paces from me, to my left,

gripping the corridor rail with his butcherhook feet –

his head snapped round to face me.

Interrogatory yellow eyes and scimitar jaw

glared. For a few instants

neither of us moved.

I’d never been this close to a hawk before. Not ever.

And so I stood there, eyes wide,

as his own locked me in their sights.

Trained twin lasers on my forehead.

Nobody else around. Everyone either in class

or (more likely) still asleep in their rooms.

(Nobody sleeps like an undergraduate.)

So just him and me. Watching each other.

Like cowboys in a standoff, under the sun.

At last he seemed to relax. Turned away,

though with one eye always on me.

Slowly I took a step forward. And then another.

Until eventually, with him, I leaned over the railing.

Felt iron under my forearms. The same iron under his feet.

And there we stayed. Two of us,

looking out over the drought-worn landscape

in the muted September heat –

flaked earth, cars in a parking lot, somnolent university buildings.

But nothing moving. Even the pine branches

hung like fossils on their scaffolds.

From the road behind the trees, a bus’s dull grumble.

Everything else – silence.

And there in that silence I learned,

from that imperious abbot in his cloister,

about a different kind of hospitality:

one which neither faces nor turns from the stranger,

speaking no word, giving no sign,

yet offering all one needs.

And after the muddied prejudices and plots of humankind

this was what I wanted;

after the bewildering taboos and negotiations of America

this was what I craved.

And though I felt a little guilty about interrupting him –

this barefoot, brown-clad Carmelite –

in his meditations,

still I stayed, selfishly; and I stayed still.

And I shared with him, in that moment,

the communion of silence

which only strangers and solitaries know;

and he recognised that, I think. And let me be.

We must have parted sometime, of course;

but I don’t remember that.

Thinking back all I remember is him,

steely and stern,

in his brown backed silence.

And I don’t think I ever saw him again.

But still, today, I am grateful.

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