There Are Encounters
There are encounters that change nothing.
No thing crawls from Earth’s surface. No
cliff or building disintegrates, no one drowns
in splintered rock or brick. No ropes
bind anyone to anyone else through the solar
plexus. No eyes latch onto other eyes, no knees
collapse as if the legs had been deboned. No
meals go uneaten, no water upturned
into a lap. No one leaves their body to look
down at the opaque beings peopling the towns.
There are encounters that change nothing.
There's an implicit sadness in this, without your having to describe it. I like the ambiguity of "encounters", that it can apply to so much.
ReplyDeleteIs the absence the thing we miss or the thing that makes those significant encounters...significant?
ReplyDeleteHi Hannah,
ReplyDeleteThere is a sadness to this poem. It evokes in me the feeling of people rushing past each other on a busy city street, or at the airport; those times when we fail to make contact, even if we sit in a waiting room, our minds so pre-occupied, as if life has been suspended, and we have no time for simple humanity, not even to acknowledge it, not even our own. ~ Annie
And perhaps many of those have happened and we have no idea that they did! So possible! Lovely as always! xoxo
ReplyDeleteYet sometimes, these encounters that change nothing of the outside world are cataclysmic to the inner world.
ReplyDeleteNo, but wait... Maybe the encounter wasn't for us but for the guy behind us...maybe our shadows fell in such a way that made him walk around a footfall, and not fall, and not break a bone or his dignity. It's like that Tom Robbins quote - "I believe in nothing, everything is sacred...I believe in everything, nothing is sacred."
ReplyDeleteI'm so incredibly grateful that you visit and comment on my ghost town of a blog - I appreciate it so much. I've been very crappy at leaving comments on yours. For this I apologize and will shrive to not be so sloppy.
ReplyDelete