“Now more than ever” they say addressing “these uncertain times” while the quiet is a lovely, spooky thing
Like Prufrock’s curling fog or the calm eye at the middle of every storm
I play the sober girl’s version of a drinking game–keep a running tally of each meaningless thing we say
To ellipsize all the scooped-out half moon lost stitches
In the story of our world
Strange how we can take words and reduce them to
shadows of their former selves
Willfully diminishing
What casts a shadow
and the utter strength of light
not to be confused with epiphany, apophony, or even apotheosis, you nonetheless came to me in a dream where we were improbably happy…
Sing
Rise
Lie
Bind
Feed
Bleed
Breed
Deem
All these lingual pawns arrayed for something. Tug of the invisible? The inconsequence of a single human life?
Spin them out from their mother tongue
Prophesy the child
Miraculously hypothetical
Salt marsh child
So reminiscent of your most beautiful
Sisters
how many words for snow
how many words for rice or rain or storms
We humans and our specificity
Yet no words for listening
Hearing you
Being there, holding on, loving you
Looking into….
Oops! Already well into
Greeting card territory
When what a body needs is those…those
Ladies in the black organza
Wailing in the streets.
Where are they? When we need them so?
All those things we need them to
Do
Be
Say, not say, feel
a new vocabulary
Esperanto for grievers
Words for here I am with you (ret)
Just being here for you (ghurt)
You are not alone (hyop)
Breathing here with you (fppt…)
There are empty rooms and rooms for more
Make more. More for all the ways
I will be with you in silence
Letters strung together for the careful listener
Unspoken I am with you
Through the storm.
I am familiar with stolen
Children stolen names
Borrowed children stolen names
Borrowed stolen beautiful
Girl metonymy
Is when you
Become a face in a crowd
The crowd then becoming
You in every face
I have looked
You in every
Looked
Have
I
No.
Can’t do that or you will lose
Her you never truly
Had
Only a name
Crumpled broken paper fluttering down from the blown-apart skyscrapers which once defined our empire
Mushroom clouded elephantine weight falls to its knees
Compressed neutron star mother
Heart the size of a sugar cube
Weight of 300 million
Cars
On my chest
As I walk through the dark
Singing off-key these borrowed breakup songs
Fierce to the teeth
Lost until I know
You will be
Safe.
Mark 8:23-25 (NIV)
He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?” [24] He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” [25] Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.
His sight restored.
There are modern stories about people born blind who, when they are restored to sight, struggle with the relationship between the words for things in the dark and the words for things in the light.
What I mean of course, is that an apple you smell and feel and eat is not always recognizable as a red or yellow fruit with a smooth skin and a core.
These modern folk have had to strive to revise their scope of the world and it has felt dangerously unsteady. Sometimes a “safe” blindness can feel more familiar than a vertiginously new world of sight.
Jesus heals this man in two stages–he first restores the physical mechanism of sight, then he gives him the language to go with his new world.
I think that heaven will be like that–our senses broadened and restored. In fact, the Sermon on the Mount is the primer for the language of heaven.
Do you want the language and culture of paradise? Then by all means abide with the world’s only native speaker–
Jesus. The Word made flesh.
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