Word Peace
He said he fell in love with words
though, he admits, the words had no say in this.
He went to live in the town called Words
where he worked in an alphabet factory
and married, not his favourite word, but one
that would accept his proposal.
She disapproved of American spelling
and Jane Austen (not enough, she said, happens
in her endless paragraphs)
but he didn’t mind her fine pronouncements,
nor the fact that sounds from lips are merely human,
for he loved her i’s, with that funny dot above each one.
After years of working within the limits of the alphabet
his comfort was that all the possible inventions
and combinations of words are infinite
or would be infinite
if the town called Words survives that long
or long enough to point convincingly
towards the idea of infinity with some hope
of being understood.
This made his marriage to a word
no more nor less mysterious than most
a tolerable grammatical arrangement.
He hoped to be entombed at last
within a perfect word
a word as yet unnamed and unimagined
a word with no need to be spoken
where he would be put into its silence,
held in the darkness of its open mouth.
No comments:
Post a Comment