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Such are our linguistic gifts that a few sentences can conjure the story of a life: a status update, an email, a few text messages. Almost without our noticing, we weave worlds from these snapshots, until an illusion of unbroken narrative emerges from a handful of paragraphs.
Why we need to invent new words
It is easy to forget there was a time before dictionaries, when everything was less defined and words had a little more wiggle room. This kept the English language alive. Dictionaries turned the language from a house that we are all free to renovate, into a museum we are only allowed to look at. So go ahead, step over that velvet rope, make up your own words. Remember that somebody, a long time ago, made up every single word in this sentence.
The first word you said was not ‘love’.
The first word, when you lay, eyes shut,
In a darkened afternoon room,
When you stood, looking down at me,
Meteor in midnight leather,
When you knelt, on a green flying carpet,
Your mouth an unstereotyped rose,
When your hair caught in my lips
And had to be gently unwound.
When you came, at the start, and before
You spoke, your first word,
Your first dream, whisper it, cry it aloud,
Shine on me, rain on me,
Rise slowly on the horizon, and say,
When I ask, the same syllable, bless
Me with simple things, ring me
Round, will me to be found — yes —
yours — yes, and again, again yes.
Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon’s eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing
there are adjectives up for sale
now diagram the sentence
What etiquette holds us back
from more intimate speech,
especially now, at the end of the world?
Can’t we begin a conversation
here in the vestibule,
then gradually move it inside?
What holds us back
from saying things outright?
We’ve killed the earth.
Yet we speak of other things.
Our words should cauterize
all wounds to the truth.
Words slip from me lately
like cups and saucers
from soapy hands.
I grope for the names of things
that are governed, like me, by the laws
of slippage and breakage.
I am like a child
left behind by the fast-talking
grownups. A tourist
lost in the blind alleys
of a foreign language.
How will I see my way to anywhere
without my words?
I slam up and down the stairs of our house:
Where are my glasses hiding?
Rimless, invisible as oxygen.
I need glasses to find them.
There must be words left
to go on searching for the ones I’ve lost
the way the blind man I once loved
found me,
first with his fingertips,
then with his whole hand.
I phone from time to time, to see if she’s
changed the music on her answerphone.
‘Tell me in two words’, goes the recording,
‘what you were going to tell in a thousand’.
I peer into that thought, like peering out
to sea at night, hearing the sound of waves
breaking on rocks, knowing she is there,
listening, waiting for me to speak.
Once in a while she’ll pick up the phone
and her voice sings to me out of the past.
The hair on the back of my neck stands up
as I catch her smell for a second.
I dream of the silence
the day before Adam came
to name the animals,
The gold skins newly dropped
from God’s bright fingers, still
implicit with the light.
A day like this, perhaps:
a winter whiteness
haunting the creation,
as we are sometimes
haunted by the space
we fill, or by the forms
we might have known
before the names,
beyond the gloss of things.
Do not make things too easy.
There are rocks and abysses in the mind
As well as meadows.
There are things knotty and hard: intractable.
Do not talk to me of love and understanding.
I am sick of blandishments.
I want the rock to be met by a rock.
If I am vile, and behave hideously,
Do not tell me it was just a misunderstanding.
