字, 如爱 (图)

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Language, like love

by Alvin Pang

can build bridges or burn them.
This much is known.

I take a word and insert it into the space between us.
Does that connect us?
Only if you take it in and make it your own.
Then you take another word and throw it back to me.

My turn.
This is about physics.
Taking a loose word, and Stretching it, transferring all
Your rage and thought and
Passion into that taut pull.
Stretching it just beyond its
Capacity.
And then letting go.

Whole strings of them.
You'd think they had substance,
the way we love to throw and stretch them out,
taut lines to peg ordinary meanings on.

Or how about morse code
where language is always a series of stops and starts:
Flash, flash, nothing, flash, flash, nothing, flash.
The way we decipher the silences,
you'd think love was written in code.
In a language like love there are only syllables
even a child could manage.

Children speak it.
So does grass, reaching upwards towards air.
The language of trees is heavy with love,
florid and accented, we even give flowers
when we do not know what to say.

You hear it in the dreamy purr of the cat
curled up on the carpet or on your lap,
you can listen to the orioles shrilling, frantic,
and think it brings pleasure.

A fish lays eggs its eyes staring straight ahead,
as if at nothing, not wanting to look back.
Too small and too soft to be marbles
the clear spheres form in spurts of foam
rising to the surface like thought balloons.

Love perhaps, like language, happens.
It's done, simply because it can be done
and someone thinks they want it to happen.

Perhaps language is most like love
when it is not there, when it has to be looked for.
When it won't come if called.
When it leaves.
When we reach for it, just before
we realise its absence.

Published in Testing the Silence (1997)

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