Lines on a Sand Cliff

Those parallel erosion lines the river made in the sand cliff centuries ago
remain somehow in the delicate wall—we could pull it down
with just our hands: a loud yell, an avalanche; yet there it stands
undisturbed except where dogs and swimmers have dug dry sluices in the form—
still it stands; its ageless indifferent triumph over the infernal patience of gravity
remains. I try so hard to find some cause for wonder in this
elaborate breastwork, these years of patient labor this
abstract aeolian rushmore of lines that are
just there—variegated, beautiful, evenly spaced parallel lines
like type on the page of the cliff, like lines of graffiti
the river wrote in the soft sand wall as slow centuries
of water evenly receding drew themselves along, as time does,
as water does, informing us with the infernal patience of gravity,
informing us—please give me your hand—informing us of nothing
we did not already understand about time and about water and the pull of the earth—
about forces so delicate—like the forces of sound in a word—so delicate
you do not feel them, no, you cannot feel them
work.

Words and Eyes

Words—and syllables or semes—accrue a sense of meaning through a history of associations, so that outside of a particular context these verbal units seem to possess meaning in themselves. If I say “dog” the almost universal reaction will be that I am referring to a particular species of animal. This meaningfulness of words in themselves has been thoroughly demonstrated to be an illusion. Words don’t “have” meanings. Words create, conjure, or negotiate meaning through actual use. Only in actual contexts, which include but are not limited to strictly verbal contexts, do words effect meanings. And any word is capable in a given context of stripping all or nearly all of its historically associated meaning. The bond of the meaning to the word is in fact so weak it can be stripped away by the merest suggestion: “From now on every time I say ‘dog’ I mean ‘house.’” What may begin as a comic substitution with short use will simply become a new meaning for the word.

Egos work in the same way. We develop through experience, each of us, what we call a personality--our "identity." But this personality, these traits by which we define ourselves and by which others define us too, can be stripped away with alarming quickness when we are put into contexts in which they are inappropriate. People’s characters are overwhelmingly situational.

Keep that in mind.

Gatesgate

Well, I've been thinking. It's about time for "-gate" to break away from its dependence on a pre-word and become a word on its own, signifying an embarrassing Washington scandal, as in "It's just a matter of time before the Obama administration experiences its first gate." It may start with the hyphen attached and/or the quotation marks or just take the plunge and go naked among us so future linguaphiles can ask how a door becomes a scandal. Then it will have to move on to the next step of a "Washington-like" embarrassing scandal and finally settle into an undifferentiated synonym for scandal, at which time we'll need to start over and replace "gate" with a new powerful suffix, "window" perhaps, and start all over. Were Robert Gates to do something Rumsfeldesque, he could hurry this process on with a "Gatesgate."

That however isn't as big a verbal gate as the one I read on the cereal box this morning: "perfekfast," no doubt a contraction of "perfect breakfast." But cleaving that final word keeping only the last syllable turns "fast" into "meal." O the circus of wording.

Where is Calvino when you need him?

From Fog on the Winter Garden

The smallest sprout attests there is no death
But that is not enough.
Be cannot be
finale of seem
when every sprout is a sign
and even the air that stings and moans
and even the nothing itself must be expressed
as it were
in being.

Nothing is never enough

the flowering April
the January wind
the winter fog that rises over the restive seeds
and hangs in the air

but still

it does remind us of things

reminds us of the icy ocean
we used to say invited us
to test our mettle past the ankles
the tingling thighs, past
the genitals and hips,
that set us high on our toes
as we inched our stomachs and chests all the way in
to our necks, skin itching with cold—and yet—
the plunge.

Blue lipped in the middle of summer
trembling on the beach
we were cold—a long time
but it was not enough
to stop us and the sun
was not enough
by the time we were almost warm
to keep us safely
on the sand. We ran
as though beckoned
and we abandoned ourselves
again and again as we always do
to the outlandish allure of things.

Gardens One