Dispatch from a walk home
in which I wild out
A man walking toward me drops an F-bomb in casual conversation to his girlfriend, while simultaneously his dogs crowd the sidewalk and block my path. He apologizes to me for one of these things— unclear which one— and I, who am the most alive I’ve been all week, smile jovially, flamboyantly, and say, “Don’t worry about it!” The look on his face says he is thinking— this girl is
touched. That is to say, I look touched. The stars in my eyes are evident. I am visibly a little crazy, and he can see it, but he doesn’t know why. It is because I
am heading home to my love. My first love. The one I keep returning to. Let me tell you a story about this love: Child-me slumped in her kitchen chair, eyes darting downward to the book concealed under the dinner table. Words are
a kind of food, feeding a different belly. And another puppy-love story from my archives: the “books” I wrote in “cursive” when I was maybe 5, more accurately gibberish squiggles on folded sheets of construction paper. I wanted so badly to write, but only understood the gist. Words were/are
something bordering on everything. I am so much older now. I have something to tell you, but if language is the cup that holds ideas, I have spilled some on my shirt. Instead, I’ll tell you
where I was walking from! The Free Library of Philadelphia, from the auditorium, in what I am tempted to call the bowels of the Parkway Central branch, were it not for the—ughhh— poopy connotations of that word. But I kinda want to make you laugh right now and the auditorium is down deep in the building and we were
digesting. The words of Nam Le, author of 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem. So perhaps you’ll forgive my choice of word, because (get this)—
he said that there is an idea in our culture that only a whole, complete, final product is good and then he said “It’s beautiful to me to be partial… to be full of doubt and revisionism.”
Nam’s conversation partner, poet and professor Airea Dee Matthews, a person who wields phrases like the “deployment of negative capability” without breaking a sweat, nods when Nam mentions the inadequacy of language, its limitations. She mhmms, if you know what I mean, and you do. These precise people
who speak like puzzle boxes, even they know we can only say so much. A poem is patient, potent, composed, a punch, and also the thing before the punch. Potential energy. If you
talk with me for long enough, eventually I will say the thing I am always thinking about: Have you considered the marvel of metaphor? How incredible that a sideways glance, the unlike thing, succeeds in capturing an essence where so-called accurate descriptors fail. In order to say what we mean
we must say something different. Language, you are inadequate for me and likewise, I am inadequate for you. We are never quite on the same page (hehe). And I
love you for it. Unfinished thing, I love you. Fill my cup again. I have an insatiable thirst. My mouth is hungry and I mean every connotation. I hope never to understand you. You have me smiling like a fool at strangers. You have me wrapped around your little finger. You have me wound up like a spring night in March. You had me and you have me and here I come, home to you
to go at it again.
