Page 169

This page links fear, silence, care, and mortality, moving from a chance for life toward the severe claim that each move has become death.

The corrected punctuation after 'scared:' gives the pause a hinge-like force. The poem escalates by subtraction until motion itself feels fatal.

Under the title 'Quiet', fear once produced silence ('I had nothing to say'), but the poem pivots on a plea, 'Let their be a chance / For life', before contracting to dread, where caution rules because 'Each move / Isn't life / Anymore' but 'is death'.