65 things said differently
When the familiar forgets itself
I was on the phone recently with a friend of mine in Munich and he was telling me about how Goethe and other German writers don’t just say tree when they write about a tree, for example. What do you mean? I asked him. They write something like “a stick with wings” he said, and then chuckled, the image not quite capturing his intended point—that he feels there is a cultural heritage of depicting, of knowing, things as very other from what they are. I felt I understood. And I loved his on-the-spot response. Indeed, what is a tree if not something fibrous and rigid, yet ascendant.
I knew he had opened something for me. It has been a while since I have posted a 65-er list and so, in honor of Stefan and his soaring forests, I share another one below.
If you haven’t had a chance, and enjoy this one, please check out others in this series: 65 things to do while watching TV, 65 ways to say I love you, 65 things to wonder about, 65 things to do while not sleeping, 65 things I want to say but never have, and 65 things to ask the Divine if it exists.
Tree: A stick with wings
Road: A journey that means something only after being traveled
Hand: An embodied logic, an anticipation, time held and time marked in wrinkles and scars. Yearning that knows your contours.
Bowl: “A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl. / Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness, / it eats them.” (from “The Bowl,” Jane Hirshfield)
Pear: An unsteady, wobbling being whose name is itself—pear-shaped—in a circumspect circular logic that riddles through the aisles
Teaspoon: A cradle promising to measure the grainy immeasurable
Tomorrow: A moistening of time into rain that hovers—suspended—in pregnant clouds above your head
The moon: Loose shard of painted-on sky
A dead leaf: Ghost shell tripping away when I ask you a question
A crow: Night-feathered witness
A letter: Folding ache of distance transmissible, distance unreachable
Saturday: A pocket full of smudged pennies, leftover lint, and torn weekday aches
New York City: slipping by / the city that reverberates / anonymous girl seen / thanking midtown midrain midlife midthought midcracks / midtracks / between
Table: “Long like the length of sitting down.” (from “A Table,” Hua Xi)
Broom: In my hands, a dance; in the corner, a headache
Phone: Mainlining your vibration high into my veins
Raindrop: Sliding witness to my surveillance, separated by clear pane
Laughter: Voice free from form
Dandelion: Neon invader, parachuting your prodigy—fairies exhaled into service
Sunday: Nothing day
Book: A mind tunnel
Page: Conversation between, conversation shelved, conversation opened, conversation plagued, conversation littered in pencil scribbled vertically along the horizontal
Word: Inefficient carrier of meaning
Letter: Really? K
Laughter: Pre-emptive defense mechanism
Joke: “Classic defense mechanism for someone with a traumatic childhood” (Nick Wilde, Zootopia 2)
Pleasing: Defense mechanism
Overworking: Defense mechanism
Intellectualizing: Defense mechanism
Shield: The intellectual and emotional overwork of ego creating new and different defense mechanisms
Vulnerable: Your shield used as a sled for two—icy don’t look upside-down
Child: Wild meadow awakening
Field: Where I meet you in love and in grief
Love: …uh, let’s put a pin in that
Monday: Me on longing tiptoe, you sighing voice low
Ocean: Terrifying expanse shushing lullabies
Threshold: Between stumbling and light bent dizzy
String: “A man was cleaning the attic of an old house in New England and he found a box which was full of tiny pieces of string. On the lid of the box there was an inscription in an old hand: ‘String too short to be saved.’” (Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved)
Puddle: Mirage splashed away by impermeable boot
Tomorrow: Hope and fear overfilling their shared chair
Words: Too leaden to love with
Still: The stopover where change reveals itself
Tuesday: A slipper found under the bed in time for making the bed
Stay: A tug, a plead, a never-been, a gift
Corner: a lip turned down, an eye seeing sideways. A just-around, shadowy familiarity of edge meeting edge with only your discards between
Home: The name you seek for your past
Wednesday: Oolong tea over-steeped
Time: The heaviness that won’t move off your chest
Words: Two swimmers on opposite shores across the sea
Night: The lonely absence builds its cloud of misspeak
Day: Texture returned to amorphous sound
Phone: Waiting blank and worrying hardened
Thursday: Running late, traffic condensed, no time for tea, last night’s dream shoved hastily in your coat
Love: …still not ready
Hamper: An upside-down hiding spot
Hello: Lonely where-are-you in a text’s nonchalant clothes
Couch: Tender was your touch, tougher chew my memories
Friday: nameless plain white paper, just like you wanted before it was right in front of you
Friday: Slid by unmarked, virgin tentative afternoon, light casts its occasion, opening just enough
Friday: Never what it promises
Window: Separation appearing as proximity. Clarity seeming like truth.
Saturday: Grey burning quiet: tea kettle whistles, microwave beeps, radiator clinks—a concert of absence
Day: A cracked bowl that I try to repair
Nearly: Bluebird nest overturned on the driveway
Love: The salty taste of your tomorrow tears. The country where my body doesn’t need a map. The harbor I sought not knowing I came by boat. Night drenches, day floods, time dismisses itself early. Where I only know you because I know nothing at all.