William Stafford poem from the book Stories That Could be True pg 145.

The Animal Who Drank Up Sound
One day across the lake where echoes come now an animal that needed sound came down and gazed enormously and instead of making any he took away from sound. The lake and all the land went dumb a fish that jumped went back like a knife and the water died. In all the wilderness around he drained the rustle from the leaves into the mountain side and folded a quilt over the rocks getting ready to store everything. He buried thousands of Autumns deep. The noise that use to come there.

Then that animal wondered on and began to drink the sound out of all the valleys the croak of the toads and all the shiny little noise grass blades make. He drank till winter Then he looked out one night at the stilled places guaranteed around by frozen peaks and held in shallow pools of star light. It was finally tall and still and he stood on the highest ridge where the sky fell away like a perpetual curve and from there he walked on silently and began to starve.

When the moon drifted over that night the whole would lay just like the moon, shining back that still silver, and the moon saw its own animal dead on the snow, its dark absorbent paws and quiet muzzle, and thick, velvet deep fur.

After the animal that drank sound died the whole world lay still and cold for months and the moon yearned and explored, letting its dead light float down the west walls of canyons and then climb its delighted soundless way up the east side . The moon owned the earth its animal had faithfully explored the sun disregarded the life it used to warm.

But on the north side of a mountain, deep in some rocks, a cricket slept, It had been hiding when that animal passed and as spring came again it waited.

Afraid to crawl out into the heavy stillness. Think how deep the cricket felt lost in such a silence the grass the leaves the water, the stilled animals all depending on such a little thing. But softly it tried, "Cricket"-and back like a river from that one act flowed the kind of would we know first whisperings, then moves in the grass and leaves the water splashed and a big night bird screamed.

It all returned out precious world with its life and sound, where sometimes loud over the hill the moon, wild again, looks for its animal to roam, still, down out of the hills, any time, But somewhere a cricket waits, It listens now , and practices at night