Used Prose Poem

Seeking A Story Without Words

He wants to tell her a story. One in which the silence is necessary to make audible the bare whistle of her breath as she sleeps. Or rather than sound, or even the absence of sound, the story might at first be no more than her faint clover scent, remembered still from the last time they touched, coupled with memory’s measure of that time they spent.

There may not even be a beginning. He wants to tell her a story without a beginning, or maybe one that is a succession of beginnings and a story without endings too.

What chance did words have beside the distraction of her body? He wants to go where language couldn’t take him, wants to listen to her breath break speechless from the parenthesis of her chest to wordlessly trace her skin like a slow flow, spreading between her nape and her breasts. What is that stretch of her body called? He is looking for a place where her body is yet undiscovered and unclaimed and unnamed.

Fiction, which may be defined as “the lie that tells a deeper truth,” is at once too paradoxical and yet not mysterious enough for this.

The lie he is looking for is one that permits them to keep going. This does not require the suspension of disbelief, but the suspension of common sense that his continued loving her requires. So, thus, his silent narrative will be forever complete... or forever incomplete.

He wants to tell her a story without telling that story with words.

2007