Language Theory
They'll be on the coast soon-where nobody listens.
there they can talk
about tulips and eucalyptus
how they are strangely similar in sound and stalk.
In one language theory:
the presence of conversation implies
an absence of deep feeling.
Another conjecture along those lines
has talk as a soup, glistening with all those fats
scientists know to be bad for the heart
Perhaps talk is the first hunger
and the hunger after that. Consider
what words a woman wants most, her lover
crooning, beautiful, over her.
He prepares a few words.
She keeps his last breathing in a book & tiptoes
out of the room. From him she learned quiet
and the difference between fete & fate
but he had no language for water, no name
for separate windows, no part of speech for the lake.
– wendy taylor carlisle