: language : bones :

by Jessica Goodfellow

Language is a map of chaos, finely veined
in remembrance of the body, finally useless.
Language is the shadow of glass, which is nothing
like glass. In particular, string in the wind.
Those angels dancing on erasers in the corner,
do they praise the spoken word or the written,
the fusion, or confusion? Goddess of memory,
Mnemosyne, bore only daughters.
Or, bears only daughters—
hard to know which tense, what language,
to use with a goddess. With her daughters.
With memory. Language is imagination’s gravity.
A failure more guaranteed than usual: using words
to describe language. Once you wondered
if cave art ever flung the moon as other
than calendar, spinning space instead of time.
Once you said light is gravity’s imagination,
the give and take of light, it left you
hopeful. Forgive me: I have made a whistle
of your hollow bones before
you were quite done with them.

 

Read : rules : wind : by Jessica Goodfellow