Making Up Words

 

There is nothing like morning,
it’s outlook unbroken,
still ringing with dreams.
I dress quickly and go out.

Over there, five, six, seven crows
in the bluing backyard air, held by
the high breeze washing
through new dogwood leaves.
Up and down the quiet block
newspapers span kitchen tables
like vast grey wings,
headlines cawing:  today it’s this.

I walk therefore I think:
so many of these houses
make no use of their windows.
Imagine the disappointment
of the glass!  No commerce,
no communication between inside
and out.  I was once,
while walking,
on the verge of discovering
a plausible theory of light
when the memory of your breasts in dark but calm water took it away.
You were a stranger then,
but you smiled as if you needn’t be.

Sometimes I make up words
as I go:  clork, scrunch,
lunkrivate, joyal, and contemplate
the sag in the electrical cables
and wait for definitions to arrive
like those white feather puffs
like breeze shakes from the treetops
like summer flurries.
Here’s one now:
Clork:  to fairly bounce, the enjoy the
awkwardness of one’s gait.
The momentum of these clotheslines is like a history text, the many prisms in the lawn sprinklers the raw materials
of a primitive suburban art.
Sprunch:  to collapse, on a whim, the disappointments
and misfortunes of the past into an unexpected, optimistic image of the present; also:
the sound of that collapse.

And the wafting porcine odors and the smell of love
so long as the neighborhood children are eating well.

Walking is free in several senses,
and if you would join me,
I think you would be pleased.
Things reveal themselves, and good thoughts come.
As it is, alone I practice breathing and seeing.

Lunkrivate:  to haul large rocks away from
a specified area in order to make a dwelling
of that place.

My life: awake,
here and now, today and today and today
Joyal:  happy in one’s moment;  also:  the feeling
of light-headedness produced by forgiving,
forgetting, being forgiven, or being forgotten.