JUST AN ORANGE

Someone is playing a note on a cello. It’s a low note, and as the bow moves deliberately across the string, the vibrations move through the air and into your body, where it reaches your very core. And you feel it, inside. That note has literally resonated inside of you. It’s such a fascinating feeling. And so to continue on with the theme that has developed this week–words, arranged in such a way, can do the same thing: resonate inside of us.

A poem that resonates with us causes either an empathetic or sympathetic response that binds us to those words. And it may be the sympathetic reaction that is the most powerful, because it gives us insight into something that we have not experienced ourselves.

As Merwin suggests in The Unwritten maybe all we need is one word. We just need to find it out, somehow. And he has let us know that it will not be easy. Anything that cannot be tempted by such eternals as love or time are going to be tricky to get at. Not even the threat of fire will yield up that word to us. We are left to puzzle, then. How? The poem has such a tantalizing ending. You are guaranteed to look at each pencil a little more reverently.

So maybe we haven’t discovered that word or words yet. But maybe it’s a word we can work around, hint at. Maybe that’s all poetry is, hinting around at what we really need. You know when you read it, if a poem’s gotten close.

A good line in a poem can make me positively giddy; make me laugh out loud with delight, even if the subject matter may be serious. Often lines require the context of the other lines that surround it, the whole poem is created for a reason; but this line by the late Leslie Norris says just as much outside of the poem as it does inside the poem it resides in.

Read it:  There. Can you feel it? And now you know. That’s the way you want to go, isn’t it.

And Sally Taylor, her mother dying in the next room
heard women’s voices, young and laughing,
come into fetch the old lady. (from the poem Borders)
(FYI: This post taken and reworked a bit from an early post written for Bells on Their Toes.)

I surprised myself in college when I figured out that not only did I love reading and literature, I was interested in language. What’s the difference? I guess the study of language deals with the technical aspects of what makes up literature. I find those technical aspects fascinating, and I’ll admit it right here: I really do find diagramming sentences, yes, fun. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. In elementary I always liked the language part the best.

{a sweet boy & his dictionary}

There are a lot of ways to define the power of a word, whether technical or poetical, or both. Words are powerful. Look one up, just for fun. You’ll learn something, or make a connection you hadn’t thought of before. In this perilous world, I am tempted to keep a dictionary by my side at all times, just in case.

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they’re hiding

they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won’t unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it
to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren’t
many
it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencil

every pencil in the world
is like this

-W.S. Merwin