My last two prompts were companion pieces, asking for pieces inspired by two of my favorite poems from Tony Hoagland, “There is no Word” and “The Word”

In response to the first, and because I am never quite sure what to do with the felling that is the consequence of too many words, and not enough meaning, I wrote the following piece:

UNMOVED

I am always home these days. Even I can scarcely believe it. But even here, I am forever scurrying, between coffee, writing, tea, phone calls, new skills, and newer maladies still.

But I have more time. On my list of discoveries this morning: cobwebs (two on the windows behind my bed; they are beautiful), trees (a newly discovered beauty of a being with languid beans, hanging off twenty to a branch, being nibbled on by one intrepid upside-down squirrel), bats (screeching at twilight and gathering at the mango tree by the fire-escape), glass earrings (swirly-gigged in blue, orange, and green), and a lone mini-hot water bag in blue with white polka dots. This house I thought I knew so well, is now along with me a breathing entity, much more resolute in its existence than me.

Outside, the children below are yelling as they bounce basketballs. A man with a mask over his mouth on which I see a chintzy print, delivers two cans of water at 10 this morning. He huffs as he tells me how nothing will happen to him, for he delivers water. Just in a geographic span of five kilometres, I know that men and women are out and about in the world, cleaning, sweeping, guarding, nursing, swabbing, cooking, feeding, and coming back home, late at night, exhausted.

I am writing, and I do not have enough words. Even more than ever, I find there is no word for living.

In the timespan of a month I see one new silver strand of hair. Old, older, oldest. But there has never ever been a good enough word for ageing, I think. I feel like that interlocutor in a conversation where someone has revealed something very shocking and I respond, “Just no words!”

I see my own frame at arm’s length, and examine its movements like a time-lapse video. This body is also a house I think. But this body is also the house-r, I also think. I have even more time to think.

For so long, I have lived only through the ongoing, relentless obligation of movement as a specific set of possibilities: outside equals speed, inside equals stasis; body equals use, mind equals transcendence; home equals quiet, world equals chaos. But now, I am still, in a room, and all around me there is everything. There is no word for the ping-pong of a life between ghostly presence and incomplete absence, for hallucinating into self at key moments to display attention, presence, familiarity, certainty, lucidity, life.

The world reveals itself one shocking event after another, one injustice after another, one unbearable weight after another, and you realize there must be a word that speaks to the cultivation of willful ignorance. And the banishment and abandonment of those with memory. There must be a word for all the writers, the dictionaries, the etymologists, the philosophers, the poets, the bards, the mendicants, the sages, and the madwomen, that we have sent away because they had the words.