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Interknit


If I try very hard I can read your voice.
I can feel it lodged in the white,
leapt from the space where words are exempt.
It hovers, resonant,
draped beyond the rim of monitors
and my uncertain reach.

You are text to me.
Text and not text.
Breath in a vortex
of fibers and light.
And through hours after nights spent,
our lines, a tent drawn taut
against the split,
I know the sound of you.

II.
Now, I come to the room where you sleep,
and your father doesn’t see, doesn’t hear
the click of keys, the shift of feet,
the way we cover our mouths
to keep from letting on.
Or how we dare to speak past
the muteness of weathered houses
and walled-off lives.

III.
I think we have found the secret.
How to touch past skin.
How fishermen feel a rainbow swim
below, until a surfacing.

That hidden things aren’t hollow, after all.
Just here and there, a door, a ladder to,
a knotted sheet tossed from a tree.
We need no more than carving tools
to leave our names in Beech.

IV.
Our hieroglyphs on cavern walls,
once faint, the blood-paint flaking there ~
Come back to life to tell us this
is who we were before.

Hillary Hays
1996

Even though your first two verses lack the designation of "I" ~ they are a breathtaking-ly accurate description of what can occur, therein that newfound realm of "Interknit." Delightful poem, Hillary.

~ Elizabeth

Excellent work in all your poetry offered on this site.
Georges.

"Delightful poem, Hillary."

"Excellent work in all your poetry offered on this site."

I can't but agree, Lizzy and Georges.

Hillary,
of course "you are text to me."
But "text and not text."

"I can try very hard to read vour voice." For a while I might even fool myself into thinking I really do. No, I know I haven't been "where you're hanging", still I feel "I can see how you're pinned". I might be wrong, but I dare say.

Thank you for the words, for those directed to all of us, and for those you chose in that other thread dedicated to "our dear lizzy" to reply to my humble remarks. (I respond in a different "topic", because I calculate that keeping your postings near the top of the list will make more people read your words that - as I said - matter.)

Back to the current poem: The web is a stage where we can do things unimagined just a few years ago, things good and things bad. New kinds of relationships become possible, new tendernesses, new cruelties, new comprehendings, new misundertandings, new trusts, new betrayals... The danger, of course, is that in face-to-face-contacts it's much easier to tell the pearls from the swine. On the other hand it's just as much easier on the "interknit" to get detached from what the swine might do to us.

But detachment isn't really what we need. We need empathy, and if empathy doesn't happen, we try for sympathy, and if sympathy doesn't happen we desperately search for agreement, and if no one agrees, we're ready to fight to be recognized - or we withdraw. Which is the worst way, but unfortunately sometimes the only way to survive.


Yes, Hillary, "you are text to me."

But it's an important text, a text that makes a difference.

I'm looking forward to more. Text. Texture.

Tom
(I don't add "sincerely" - If this wasn't implicitely understood there'd be no sense at all in my postings...)

-------------------------
"From bitter searching of the heart
We rise to play a greater part"

Thank you so much, Georges ~ Sincerely, Hillary Hays