Fulcrum
There is the time before you move into the world,
thinking about what will be,
waking in what room, with whose body overlapping
yours in trust, what dog skittering in
to find you who you see only in sounds, toenails
skritching on the hardwood,
light jingle of collar and ID tags in time with his
steps. And then there is all
the rest of time, when you move amongst the world,
still so many unknowns, but
life seems to replace these. The spell of the nouns
called home, to you, the spell
of the life immersive and wet. You walked the plank
without knowing you were walking.
“whose body overlapping
ReplyDeleteyours in trust”
I’ve been hearing more and more about teens and college students “hooking up” based entirely, or just a lot, on sexting, hitting the hay with little or no knowledge of each other in “real life,” compared to electronic “life.” As a codger, but also still a male, one of several things I find disturbing in the stories about the youth scene has to do with being “yours IN TRUST.” How can there be trust without meeting? Or THAT kind of meeting if there’s no trust, no basis for trust?
I think it’s reasonable to say that some kind of trust is your primary purpose here, including the warmth and doginess of the home scene as prep for your character’s having her own ID tag (nice stroke!) while walking through the unknowns and returning safely.
I also love the “spell of nouns.” I’m hardly the first to say so, but we might think more than we do about parts of speech as we think about the world and our way of being in it. Yes, old farts might indulge in a tyranny of grammar and overly rue the loss of the old ways, but youth ignores the nature and rules of language at its peril.
Enough? Oh, I think so.