Words are always there bubbling up from all the years, all the thinking, all the hearing, all the seeing, all the memories, layer on layer.
Words are in the night and early morning between waking and sleeping, wisp cloud phrases evaporating
Words are on the underside of dreams, in the dragged behind blanket of the child inside.
Words are at the washing line and at the shore edge and in sunsets and in the life-worn face of the man at the busstop.
Words are in the upside backwards phrases of children, infants new to language, hanging it on new pegs
Words are under the bed in dust bunnies while you’re cleaning, overhead in spider tread cobwebs
Words are in your heart, your head, your eyes, your mouth, your nose, your liver, blood and toes
Words are in the soft bleary eyed graphic scratchings on wood made pale and blank and waiting
Words are in the grasping for threads, glistening in the periphery, rotating out of reach but then…
Somehow, held, caught, fastened, fashioned, siphoned, sipped, snipped, clipped, shone, one put upon another, like this
This completely manages to sum up exactly my feelings about words, and you have written it so beautifully. I love the way words combine together and give new meaning, and you are a master at this.
If this is so, then there is hope for me 🙂 Stunning work, again. Thank you for writing it.
What a fine thing to read at the top of the morning. Beautiful. True.
Words may well evaporate in that liminal state between awake and asleep, but like a child’s bubbles, they leave the faintest trace, which if we breathe upon ever so gently, if we stroke the impurities away with a fine camel hair brush like the archeologists, then we can still disinter them and reclaim them for our work.
And you do Alison, you do …
Simply beautiful.
Love this. Love this one best: ‘Words are on the underside of dreams, in the dragged behind blanket of the child inside’.