རྟིན་འབྱུང 

Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

Downpour

he loved words.

not in the sense in which

love is so easily professed these days

but in an old-fashioned

genuinely romantic sort of way

spiritual

but with a material component

the word made flesh

so to speak

and flesh become word

in a way

it was not in the least

an abstract obsession

with some ideal Logos

no, the articles themselves

where his articles of faith

while the verbs in all of their doings

screwed up his soundest vows

of silence

and inaction

to use an expression

it was the real utterances

misspoken and squeaking

that he was enamored of

it was their

ineffably mysterious grunts

seeming to make sense

when in fact

they were the merest puffs

of clunk and whimsy

(oh, that meaning could so be written

in the air!)

and so he despaired

when he could not find

the right one

inanity though it be

but loving them as he did

he did sometimes seem

to put them at their ease

and they would come

unannounced

speaking for themselves

telling their own stories

almost

verbatim

and it was in this act

(no act at all

but genuine interest and concern)

that they at last perhaps

relaxed into his embrace

and there, mumbling

all the way

he would caress them

one by one

let his lips pout and pucker about them

reveling in their

fricatives and diphthongs

his tongue

would tease and tap out

codes from the sleek cavities

of their open vowels

until for lack of a better word

their meaning howled

and then stretching and intertwined

vowel harmony or not

they’d string each other out

in a long foreplay of whispering

a sotto voce

lilting and building

until it passed

that singular point. and emerged

full voice

at the beginning of a new sentence

some of them he found to be

much deeper than he had expected

others turned out to be

rather vapid and even

tepid, but in a lovely way

a denouement

of simplicity and overstatement

a giggled shiver of pretense

but no longer tense

just become

a plainspoken

“it is what it is”

straightforward declarative

as poetic as any

comparative

and so it went

not so much a verbal promiscuity

as a desire to use them all

in fevered raidings of the OED

and tricks he’d learned from how to manuals

he dabbled even in the dark arts

of neologisms and foreign loan words

of mantra and trance-dictated scat

oh how he moaned with

the heaved utterances

of heaven-sent glossolalia

a hundred and one peaceful and wrathful multilingual deities

no longer sure who was saying what to who or how

while all along

a million velvet ears convulsed

and maybe it was this

Passion

that lead him to a dawning angst:

he kept recognizing words

he’d used before

and the thrill was gone

he noticed that the more

he spoke clearly

the more he clearly spoke

what was now too

literally understandable

it was making too much sense

in a sense

and the mystery of the not quite said

the not quite inexpressible

was now gasping like a fish

on sand

so much for understanding

in his desperation

to reignite the flame

he began searching

in exotic corners

for languages not oft heard

he hired a Navaho

to translate his selected verse

into the language of The People

and would sit nodding sagely

as it was read back to him

restoring the harmony

of the Hrozo

of the veil of unknowing

his selected essays

he had rendered into an untranscribed

Bushman sub-dialect

to hear again in the pattern of the

clicking and the glottal stops

something of what he had meant to say

but even to these sublime obscurities

he eventually became habituated

and raging for his ineffable fix

he fixated on yet more radical plans

of translation:

he placed microphones in the woods

to pick up the sound of wandering winds

digitized the output and

randomly assigned them based on direction and decibel level

to trigger

famous passages of

Thai love poetry and Tibetan opera

but more and more

it was the sound of the winds themselves

which seemed to soothe him

he wanted desperately to be saying what he was saying

not alluding to it, not pointing to it

not describing it

he wanted the saying itself

to be the saying

or at least to be

an inextricable part of the saying

and it must be perfectly clear

all walls down

and yet and yet

perfectly indescribably

strange

a whatness without a witness

a wildness imbued with suchness

so he collaborated with a

quantum physicist

and a hidden wizard

to scan each raindrop

into a database

cross-referenced with every baby name

in every known tongue and

every name of every god and goddess

and heck some really quite minor deities

thrown in to be sure

so that the sacred falling of each drop

would sing its uniqueness

to each of the other falling perfections

and it was a beautiful

music that spanned the electromagnetic

rainbow

a lyricism that swelled and awed and yet was

wet and humble

and yet

it too at last

did not suffice

and so he wept

and laid his head down in the grass

and turned to face the downswelling sky

and opened his mouth

and swallowed it all

and so was born his peace

no telling of

no yelling out

the telling now was seamless with the told

and what was told of

was also what was telling

was the telling itself

was the loudest quiet never heard

was better than

a god in rut

was the magnificently

simple coitus

of the rain