by Jeff Hardin
We don’t live in a realm where words are bioluminescent.
Otherwise, we’d know when someone speaking emitted
light. Shouldn’t some conversations be suffused with an
inner glow? Would, then, dark motives be harder to hide?
Harder to imagine is how every word is an intersection,
radiating outward to touch upon evening primrose
or runoff coming down a hillside toward the creek
or how the hawk withholds its cry until the moment
it doesn’t and then how seemingly the entire universe
seizes, stalls, drifts along, widens outward and upward,
contracts into leaf-stems quivering, readying to fall,
then ignites again, already in the middle of something
whose mysteries we can only wander the edges of.
Which direction, though? For how long? Alone or
with others? Amid rainscapes and wordscapes, will we
reach our destination? If not, then may no one tell us
so that, continuing on, we get closer and closer, our
minds renewed by this or that word bestowing the way.
