The Accidental Poet
< People with Wernicke's aphasia may speak in long, complete
sentences that have no meaning, adding unnecessary words
and even creating made-up words.>
The Accidental Poet
I have come to terms with language,
dyslexia jailed then freed me
a framed sky for instance,
or the open nature of oceans for instance,
one denies the other.
He had a brain injury
a perfectly constructed man
until the fatal blow of his Muse.
Now he speaks only in poetry,
a language unbounded.
Some thought him touched
by a language that had no beginning nor end.
The man spoke direct from the Fountain,
the Wellspring.
Out God poured,
out poured the bedeviled and the saintly,
the lost and found,
seers so blinded by love
they must vocalize each sound.
An idiom that passed all understanding
yet could be grasped on the wing
an ephemeral thing, a single Mayfly
in an endless array of May blossoming.
It was a beautiful seamless moving hem
of apperception, a cloth made whole.
It was beautiful even when it was ugly.
It was the poetry of words set free.
I wondered if my own trivial dyslexic mind
could ever hope to match his artistry
and knew it never would.
You would have to take out the brain
find that breach in its convolutions
through which God speaks.
I knew this, the way a child knows
the uncharted face of its birth mother,
yet I still try to drive a wildness
through a picket fence.
Old words won’t do anymore,
the scaffolding is too overworked, it won’t hold,
the used-up must go the way of all dead things,
to the soil
where roots know the birth-pains of green.
The man talks on, the therapists shrug,
try to force his tongue into neat, prepackaged boxes
but it will not fit,
he smiles as they wipe spit from his lips,
keeps explaining God to them
but they have no understanding of poetry;
they keep begging him too slow down
but he is way ahead of them
and always will be.
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