Word Beyond Words

In the fullness of the years, like it or not,
a luminous mist surrounds me, unvarying,
that breaks things down into a single thing,
colourless, formless. Almost into thought.
The elemental, vast night and the day
teeming with people have become the fog
of constant, tentative light that does not flag,
and lies in wait at dawn. I longed to see
just once a human face. Unknown to me
the closed encyclopaedia, the sweet play
in volumes I can do no more than hold,
the tiny soaring birds, the moons of gold.
Others have the world, for better or worse;
I have this half-dark, and the toil of verse.

Jorge Luis Borges, "On His Blindness"

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Dear Alex,

I have been resisting the unpacking of light from this poem. Who can see more? The one who has lost sight, or the one whose sight is lost?

It depends on how you're looking at it. Looking at it. And again.

Borges, a poet and writer from Argentina, scattered light in his blindness to dark places. He came from an era and culture unseen by most of us anywhere on the globe. At his highest wave of life-sailing, his sight failed but not his foresight. In historical hindsight, he shines through our eyes in verse. And again in reverse.

Summer is riding high now on a heat wave towards 90+ degrees Fahrenheit in Southern Oregon. The sun confronts my dog daily until she bows her head at will and squints at dirt. She does not miss the sky. In fact she rarely looks up. Sun or not, she sees what she needs to see and moves on. War time. Famine. Tyranny. Climate displacement. Happening now on the same dirt under the same sun as we speak. She fusses not. Her tummy is packed more than a little.

Who can see more - the blind or mind? We are not going to see anything until we unpack in hunger and start eating against starvation.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

There are many ways to define poetry; a poem can indeed be many things.

Using words to take us to a place beyond words, I would like to think, is what poetry is.  I don't know if this is helpful because, first, it's obviously proposing a self-contradiction.  And second, more significantly, I am not sure if all poets can be spoken of as calling on the power of the Word beyond words.

Maybe at the end it is a matter of degree, a way to speak the unspeakable as compared to what?  To being "stuck with the same lousy, degraded building blocks as lawyers and propagandists and writers of college regs and hashtaggers."  Poetry is for those who are sick of the disease that is our language and dying to be freed from its suffocating.

A person who misuses language for his own gain can't stand poetry.  He would say in it there is no "productive value" (i.e. no money, fame, power, know-how) and for that a waste of time---until he could find a way to sell the ditty, to make himself a name with the silly little verses.  A sermonizer wouldn't mind prescribing a poem if it is useful to his pontificating.

I suspect a true poet somehow expects herself to be misread or even unread, but whatever it is she also knows it to not be the final word on her speaking.

Yours, Alex