Saying It
Saying it. Trying to say it. Not to answer to logic, but leaving our very lives open to how we have to hear ourselves say what we mean. Not merely to know, all told, our far neighbors; or here, beside us now, the stranger we sleep next to. Not to get it said and be done, but to say the feeling, its present shape, to let words lend it dimension: to name the pain to confirm how it may be borne: through what in ourselves we dream to give voice to, to find some word for how we bear our lives. Daily, as we are daily wed, we say the world is a wedding for which, as we are constantly finding, the ceremony has not yet been found. What wine? What bread? What language sung? We wake, at night, to imagine, and again wake at dawn to begin: to let the intervals speak for themselves, to listen to how they feel, to give pause to what we're about: to relate ourselves, over and over; in time beyond time to speak some measure of how we hear the music: today if ever to say the joy of trying to say the joy.
"Saying It," from Lifelines by Philip Booth, copyright © 1999 by Philip Booth. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.