Language is a River

Sometimes, words fall through space
out of sheer loneliness; pine for connection.
Take any noun, on its own,
vagrant, indigent, languishing in isolation.
But should a willing adjective stop by, noun
is changed, charged, coloured, like a scarlet macaw.

And see the verb that glances,
how it’s struck by the painted preposition,
enticed into a syntactical ménage à trois
to create the tight triadic world of a sentence.

Forging fact or fantasy, mask or vulnerability,
able to convey beauty or blight, hate or light,
or this singular thought: Go on gorgeous,
get over yourself,
come on down to the water’s edge,
join our ragged tide of loss, hope, and clumsy love.

I know a poet who bends low
to listen to the spaces between words.
Labours to narrow the gap of these small cracks
through which meaning falls.
Resists the temptation
to choose the better sounding word
rather than the right one.
Waits for 20 years
until the better sounding word
becomes the right one.

For language is a river,
its headwater unscalable, unseen;
gathers a lexicon from the great glossal basin
of branches, feeders, rills;
and the dialectic silt from distant rains.

The river flows toward fluent confluences
of meaning; meaning shared,
then sundered by rocks and rapids;
languishes in argot eddies, reconstitutes
in quiet currents.

Sediment, marl, alluvial sleep, force
the lingual bends into overstated loops
until the banks are breached and the bend
cut off, leaving behind an oxbow lake,
stagnant as Latin.

And still the river flows, courses
toward some grand delta: is it not our deep, spreading desire,
for the reversal of Babel? categories undone, borders overrun
by raids of goodwill, people listening, not shouting,
blind biases burned away, kindness raining.