Tag Archives: language
Words escape me
through the latest perforation, this Swiss cheese, this colander, the hole punch of each passing day, the mute minutes in which my ability to name and thus constrain becomes ever more soluble. How readily they slip from my loosened grasp, scatter and gambol through meadows outside my purview, freed from the meaning I made them […]
Say sensible things
When animals talk to themselves they say only sensible things: the noun of threat or safety the noun of wind of sun of rain of snow of shelter and rest and warmth and many good verbs: eat drink fly swim run also play the verbs purr and sing call and thrum and few but crucial […]
Crush
I have developed a crush on my veterinarian, the most useful romance I will never have. Still, I learn her language: I speak inflammatory bowel disease, chronic pancreatitis, allergic sensitivity, idiopathic origins, unpredictable progressions. This one will end where it starts, will leave me doting on the old cat purring in my lap as I […]
Diacritical
Pate is a head, pâte, a porcelain, pâté, an appetizer; the devil, they say, is in the di-ˈtāls. Or,ˈdē-tāls. How you complicated love, that single syllable, how your troubled tongue twisted and tortured its sweet consonance, could not speak, nor your ear, hear, the essential emphasis, where it must fall — must — if any […]
Me you may call Sir
If he may be she and she may be they me you may call Sir as in knight bachelor as in knight errant as in courageous and questing unfettered undaunted not for me spinster that pitiable title assigned unmarried women its sad connotations its shriveled possibility not like bachelor nothing like knight no if he […]
Leave nothing out
Love appreciated, she thought, is a well-wrought poem, each gesture essential, any omission a violence, an ignorance of what is necessary. Elision may support a lie, ellipsis an efficiency, yet speaking a tongue we only half-shared, how could we know what was true, and what expendable? The last stanza, she thinks, should say nothing, leave […]
Tongue-tied
My usual trail run was a little slow the other day, because it’s hard to run when you’re laughing. I had been tooling along my regular 6.5-mile route, wending up and down hills, when I encountered a long string of high-school runners heading the other direction. The local cross-country team, gearing up for the new […]
Obsequious dogs; impervious cats
If you’ve been paying any attention to the news lately, you’ve probably heard about an Hungarian study that indicates dogs understand human language in a much more sophisticated manner than previously thought. The study exposed 13 dogs to recordings of their owners’ voices in both appreciative and neutral tones while observing their brains with a […]
Tongue-twisted
My usual trail run was a little slow the other day, because it’s hard to run when you’re laughing. I had been tooling along my usual 6.5-mile route, wending up and down hills, when I encountered a long string of high-school runners heading the other direction. The local cross-country team, gearing up for the new season! […]
Meditatio Ephemera 