346. To Open

O

mit

as a

word

and a

notion

from an

open door

that admits

what it can’t

hope to make

from or out of

a simple sense

of a word as an

encounter within

the space of singed

bodies of knowledge

where versions arise

and disperse irreduced

from the forms they once

and always had given the

state of the earth as flux as

flowing as tongue ebbs from

the back of the teeth and air

slips out into words and back

inward into breath we are lost

and wreckage of words and the

beach is strewn with letters and

vocules of the language we never

had meant to learn but which had

become us as we had become more

nothing more than a sound or what

remained behind after speaking as a

taste upon a tongue or the ear feeling

just a bit more acutely flowing blood in

its reticulations and in the catch basins

for sound but everything is awkward and

clumsy given to extremes left in place long

enough and it seems as to have always been

there even if it was no more than the passing

of a thought one of the small deaths of human

thinking that arrives each day refreshed shiny

ready for its place in the amazement of human

communication only to disappear to be forgotten

almost at the point of its unremarkable birth and

that is the way of words to flow out and through us

to intersect our bodies through our heads our mouths

our ears buzzing on the way through our fingers yet we

believe that there is something to them that they give us

more than they take away that there is some sense-making

from all this sign-making this trading of messages my small

letter to you my words in your head as you read it and words

that you send back if you send any back which is not required

because communication is a give-and-take and does not need to

be a give-and-take-and-give-in-return the voice is still there in the

air or on the page and meaning is nothing but the suppuration from

the wound that a word clearly is in the way that a mouth gapes with

a red gash whenever a word is released it is blood the pain of birth all

memories of what has come before and died at the point of labor we are

all something that has been ejected from a body removed from the bodies

of our mothers long in working us out of them and hoping to say something

profound from the mere act of expulsion the womb is Eden and we are its only

fruit born ripe and screaming the sea of the mother soaking into our skin we are

only sponges that soak up the world and die only to dry into crusts empty of sense

and import the remaining husks of selves that roamed the earth with the intent to

make of it something even if nothing much and to make it out of the words we took

out of it and the words we added back into it just as we accept and thus subtract one

word from the earth we return and thus add another one to it all without tally and all

in the manner of those humbled by the fact of existence however penurious even bereft

of palpable significance because we are creatures of the sign the signs we make the signs

we take the signs we find within the signless earth the lumbering body of the sea trudging

body of firm and supple earth the evasive body of the air around us what is invisible sustains

us and we are suspended in the dark cathedral of absolute meaningless yet we sing our hymns

up and into the darkness which is almost solid too us solid enough to keep us from breathing our

nostrils blocked with a black sticky substance so as we gasp for air our mouths bring in only more

of it sight is a solid sable eye of the raven the body of height all between degraded columns of sun’s

light falling falling heavy and falling hard shattering but thudding about us and we are barely mist

or missed by its weight what crumbles is the secure reality we do not live within which actually lives

within us we are giant bodies of sight cameras obscurae that reflect something into ourselves making

it real only through that unavoidable action however slight we are borne by the wind forth into life but

the wind is but the slightest breath from our bodies for we are all of reality and reality is defined by our

words the ones we pass between each other the ones we hold within our bodies only for ourselves the ones

we speak aloud but in places where only we can hear that we have not come here of our own volition we were

called into this place by people who did not know who we were or what we might do by children of other children

all of us dumb but chattering all the while as if we had something important to say as if there was something to say.