on words before time

I.

I (*pause, inhale deeply, sigh it out*) am in love.

These words?

Ignited me.

Burned in me before I’d ever heard them uttered..

These words?

Isolated me.

Marooned me till I, woman, became an island, impossible and glorious.

Their cadence?

Tore through my soul and re-introduced me to myself.

Spoke my humanity.

Sung my desire.

Whispered my heartache.

Shouted my fury.

Caressed my soul.

These words breathed me into being.

From words I was formed and to words I return.

I love their all in all.

Power conveyed to nothing-me

to grasp the intangible,

to describe the invisible,

to fold into myself the inevitable,

and lay at your feet the indescribable.

Oh, but how I hate.

I hate that these immutable words preempt my every thought.

I hate that these interminable words spoke me before I ever uttered them.

I hate that these words were before me and before all time.

I hate how they have been spun and caressed,

wooed and seduced,

breathed out and breathed in a billion times before my first.

Every word.

Every line.

Every intimation of intimacy

Sucked out of them til I.

I am left breathless,

Speechless.

Wordless.

Powerless.

Each expansive, enigmatic, enticing utterance leaves me

envious, embittered, and empty

Words, promised me, cheated on me,  failed me

Words, leave me panting, anticlimatic

As all the passion seeps from my soul, my marrow, my lips

Until I am silent and still.

Mellifluous and cacophonous.

Ellipses to the eternal noise

of words, words, words

…

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on reawakening wonder

All the words that come afterwards are a feeble attempt to recapture that initial fleeting take-you-by-surprise gasp, that raw emotion that wells up unexpectedly, that catch-in-your-throat gone-to-soon breathtaking moment of first awareness. That slipped-from-grasp, awestruck millisecond of sheer wonder. This cannot be recaptured. This profound magnificent laid-out-at-my-feet, this before me now. This certainty, this age-old beauty. This shifting and reshaping, this steadfast landscape. This eternity is no less awe-inspiring and majestic than in that first sigh of wonderment. But the effortless startling passion of it must now be gently seduced back into my awareness. I must look and look at it. Take intimate note of its curves and nuance. Pay attention to its every shadow-of-turning. In these fleeting after-moments it has lost none of its glory; it is only that I have lost my sense of it. How easily and quickly our senses dull. And all that’s left is for us to patiently resharpen them, nurture this keen sensitivity, coax and caress our sensibilities, reignite our consciousness. Reawaken our spirits. Stand silent before infinity and marvel, MARVEL, at the sheer unadulterated wonder of it.