WORDS
By
Eileen Howard
Words where have you gone???
Now---when I have need of you
into what distant cavern have
you fled? And do you sit there
hooting with laughter and flicking your
fleas?
Please.
(I have need of you.)
The need is to fashion an edifice
of some substance and sense.
No. Rationale? Sense is all
---sensibility, sensuality, sentience
scents of all organic life and lichen.
That is all the sense in my life now.
Where is the substance?
I am coasting on the edge of
All my past experience and the
Slide is precipitate and
unpredictable.
Where is the (considerable) understanding
of all this past
experience?
I try to reason and get only murk
muck and old leaf mold and again an
olfactory fungal essence, but
no guidance.
Thought. Reason. You have always
been in words.
So Where are you
And why do I have
this overwhelming “feeling”
that sense is not this time
available from my traditional thought
realm--verbal journeying in
my mind,--but on a different
plane altogether?
(I am a lost pioneer.)
Just when I start to get a handle
Must the venue shift and change?
Will this “other” sense become
palpable? How do I pursue it?
Do I have to let words go?
EILEEN HOWARD says, "I am a 66 year old psychiatric home care nurse…I worked in hospitals,and for family planning and sold copper and coat hanger “art” and jewelry in town fairs." She ran a cooperative play group when her kids were young and found that expanded into communal gardens etc.
"On a more prosaic side, I always wanted to have a cabin with a Clivus toilet. I've taken apart and reconstructed toasters, my flute etc. I came from a family that encouraged innovative ideas and thinking out of the box." EILEEN shares that she's just returned from casting her 94 year old Dad’s ashes over his beloved
MOTIVATION:
"This was written, after my break up of a 20 year marriage. I had always (still do, actually) process difficult, gloriously wonderful, perplexing life events through writing and words…where they clearly, inexplicitly at the time, failed me. Some of the sense that not everything has to be nailed down with words and rationality still prevails. This was my first encounter with this possibility…."