Interesting poem. The idea of "silent poem" would be readily intelligible if consisting of a list of things (nouns) -- just the things themselves, no statements about the things, hence "silence." But Francis adds the curious additional limitation that all the nouns be compounds. I'm not sure what to make of this but am persuaded that he had a real idea about it which I'm not getting. The compounds seem like (quasi-chemical) precipitates from un-silent, declarative language, maybe. It's like each compound has an untold story, or rather perhaps a previously told & mostly forgotten story.
Meanwhile the sequence seems generated by various logics: alliteration, rhyme, word-association, idea-association. I'm not getting all the higher-level patterns Marilyn suggests exactly but I agree that it is evocative especially towards the end. In any case it is convincingly non-facile.
The poem is also metrically interesting in the way the trochaic rhythm asserts itself on the compounds. E.g., "honeysuckle" -- really requires 2 levels of stress: HOneySUCKle except that "HOney" as a whole takes a stress in relation to "SUCKle" as a whole. Similarly, the disyllable-monosyllable compounds ("underbrush", "buttermilk", "candlestick", etc.), are not, I think, real dactyls in this context, Marilyn. They are subsumed by the trochaic rhythm so that, e.g., "under", a trochee itself, nonetheless takes a stress as a whole in relation to "brush." In normal English accentual syllabic (iambic or trochaic) verse, "honeysuckle" would be two trochees (or parts of 3 iambs, as in "a honeysuckle kiss"). This poem takes the word out of that metrical ballpark. .... (But yeah, you have to be a real meter-geek to find this interesting).
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