I Will Arrive Half an Hour Ago

Geof Huth, "TEERTS" (12 November 2016)
Language wants to be poetry.

It wants to do more than tell. A story, it realizes, has some magic in it, but it isn't of magic. A story repeats an event (real or imagined). A poem is the event.

The actuality of a poem coursing through the human body—to the brain, the heart, the lungs—is a happening within us. The sound of language that means without telling hits us the hardest.

The play of language off the tongue and its flicking in the ear (even language that comes from the hand, chasing into the eye) is not a thing but a state of the briefest ecstasy, the smallest rush. 

Of blood, of breath, of brimming.

Once a pun slips into those streams of words over words, there is a little electricity in the air. The language tells us, "I am not real. I do things real things don't." 

We hear in the voice of the speaking something that tells us nothing because of how it tells us everything: how we make everything out of nothing, how a tongue can entertain in cacophonies and symphonies, how the smallest word out of order or twisted is a bit of frisson against the skin.

The word is the world.

Nothing else contains itself and evaporates through itself. Nothing else is open and closed simultaneously—always requiring the key to the code, when there are billions of keys and each opens up just a little piece of the language. 

We cannot know the whole language; we just made more of it today.

If I tell you, "I will arrive half an hour ago," you will know I will have already had left, even though I am still there with you, waiting for your breath to whisper me a word.

ecr. l'inf.