There Are No Words

By JESSE ARLEN

The sky, they assure me,
Is not the sky but the universe.
Today there are no clouds.
Its blue blue blue blue blue
Is as blank as bleached flour.
I can tell you, for I am looking at it.
There is nothing for the eyes to see,
Nothing on which to stop or rest or anchor.
The hebrews imagined waters
Above the vault of the heavens.
It is nice to imagine that behind the expanse
There is something like the ocean—
Water teeming with life.
It is nice to imagine that through sluices in the vault,
Life-water falls upon the earth
When it rains.
It is nice to imagine that beside me you are—
And even though I cannot see you—
You are here, barefoot beside me,
Playing with the buttons on my shirt,
Adorning my pockets with flowers.
But I am looking and I can tell you:
Up above, there is nothing,
Beside me, there is no one.
Scientists pretend that the earth is a globe.
The earth is flat.
If it were round, then the weight of our bodies,
The gravity between you and I,
Would stretch-sink to convergence the bent earth.
But I sink straight down.
The bleached sky.
I cannot look at it,
And I cannot look away—
Like a father staring at his stillborn child.
There is nothing living.
The sky blanches my mind.
And instead of wordfulness—
Morphemes attaching and binding,
Like ionizing particles into a little love poem molecule—
There is a single sentence,
In the four languages I know,
And the morphemes are locked in place like that.
Today is as ordinary as toast for breakfast,
As black tea in the evening.
There is no excuse or explanation
For why every nerve in my mind
Has wired itself into a linguistic loop.
But this is the poem I must write for you,
When it is like this,
And I still must explain how much I love you:
Voch parer gan.
Lo hayah dovrim.
Il n’y a pas de mots.
There are no words.