Someone asks you what you're searching for
when you find yourself searching, not seeing,
and an answer comes to you right away
and you overhear yourself say, language,
a way to speak plain and simple, words to say
what you see, yet the right word, at times
the right syllable or the right punctuation,
or none
So you self-talk the whole rest of the day
counting syllables and lining up words
and looking at that whole issue of right speech,
which by more than mere co-incidence
but by co-dependent origination
dwells embedded in the eightfold path
(of Buddhism)
You think of Martin Heidegger's
Language is the house of being
and the time in Poland you presumed to quote that
but the translation made for some small joke
in the room at the time, and still today,
when you meet with those who shared it,
you laugh; but in time you turned word-wise
unbelieving, a doubting Thomas
Language seems to you more a place to point
than a space to live now and the pointing must be plain and simple,
like your dad once pointed to a stone and said
that there's called a "stone," son, but you both knew
"stone" would not break windows or limbs and
"stone" you could not walk on or sleep on or turn
into trinkets, but That There serves all that and more
It's the thing itself that matters most now
so if you have a craving it must be
to get inside a thing and dig around,
probing for the gold you know's got to be there
like coal in a mine that's not petered out
and still you know there's no way to the inside
of a thing itself but by the brain and the eye
of some brain's mind
So you must be still and look
as if seeing for the very first time
the most ordinary of things that are to you
so familiar and routine and everyday in their bearing
that you are more likely to overlook them or discard them
or undervalue their use as portals
onto what is and what is not there
Clearly it is your duty to find the thing there
and to say what you do find by the mind's eye
that notices and by words that dare not aim
to represent or capture but, more humbly,
having seen a way, to direct attention
to what's there to see and just as cheerfully
to what's not there to see
For all that, you know you must not be there
to see there, for to see clearly you cannot be;
as clarity grants no clinging, not even one
attachment or ego entanglement because
you could not endure the delight,
and by that same motive,
praying to be and be blessed,
you might settle for coal in place of gold
Language lets you point to what's seen in your absence
and to witness a feeling of being not your own to claim
