[Previous] [Menu] [Next]

Page 175

There are dim borderlines where noise becomes language
or vice versa. Exhausted, marinating in cold sweat,
you stir from a long fever, the room just coming
out of its spin, someone saying something, a bright,
cold voice -- female! -- questioning, "Look? Flunk?
Who knocks? Podunk? Who? Do you?..." -- no, it's water
dripping into water -- a sink? Yes! The bathroom sink!
(An instant release from misunderstanding, knowing
that what you couldn't understand was simply
not to be understood that way.)

Or you drift off to sleep on the couch, TV voices
becoming other voices, other times, rain on the roof,
geese overhead, their creaky honks, a tree groaning
as it falls (wondering if it will be saved
by no one's having heard it and will it count
that it has been heard in someone's dream?)....

But at the borderline between language
and noise -- there's the hovering point,
the philosopher's howevering point (a transition,
after all), the blankness, words without meanings,
meanings without words [fish without bicycles,
doctors without borders -- and then there's the landlady's
daughter who used to flirt with all the boarders, but
her Mom sold the place, so now she's joined
Daughters Without Boarders; I'm a snake
in digression] --

no man's land, where only the autistic or senile boldly roam,
oblivious (or pretending to oblivion); where the rest of us
grope, knowing that we know, knowing that we
don't know, denying both, struggling to be blank,
to wrench free of this sticky mire of blankness.

Note: The point where philosophers hover and "however" is referred to as "a transition, after all" because "however" is a transition word, a way of getting from one line of thought to a different line of thought – like "moreover", "but", "yet", "and", "albeit", "although" and "Oh shit! I left the gas on!" The line "I'm a snake in digression" puns "snake in the grass" and refers to my frequent trailing off into silly or serious digressions that coil sinuously about the main themes (if there are any).

[Previous] [Menu] [Next]