cavity

There is man I know who knows words. He shows me a poem but I don’t understand it.

And he, who shows me this poem is above me, academically, intellectually. I wish I could say something profound but there is only profoundness in that which I struggle to explain. How given the author, in the flesh, in sight of me, at the precise time, then I would know something a little more substantial, slightly more redeeming. I’d know his motivation, what was in his heart as he penned it, if he was anxious, sad, broken, lugubrious.

Just as I know of this man, standing close, with the book open, of how he hides, of why his eyes like thorns and mist, tear me apart. I want to tell him I love him because he is fragile and needing of it. And because I mean it.

I barely know him though, and all he knows of me is that I don’t understand what he’s just read to me.

I am in this moment both the idiot and the savant with no way of defending how information is carried to me, invisible and inarticulable.

So distracting with him so close, in body, in mind, in emotion. I am not the lunkhead I appear, I want to say.

He stands there post-reading and I look at him with blankness. I barely know him and yet I care for him.

Silence, awkward with my non-reaction to the scribe and to the pause filled with so much bulging emptiness.

I want to reach for him, but know this is a ditch not yet dug, and so I settle for concealment, not of my supposed ignorance to this piece of literature, but of the precarious way I see into his heart.