recherché

It waits among the ornaments and the frippery, the word unsaid so long because it means something, the word gravid with itself. Something more than the style or the school, something deeper than the shop chop, something more solid than author or artist. The long toothed ones slumbering in between spines on the shelf, the arcane ones lost between the grimoire and the stacks, the technical ones still loitering in the language after the technology walked away. It is the purview of the seeker, the scholar, the priest and the witch. It is the last refuge of the fake, the posturer, the martinet, and the forger. Some become odd because of the redistribution of attention, the contraction of curiosity, the topology of culture. Some only grow odder with use. 

The words that need to be there never wait. They push their way up flights and to the front of the queue, roll back the stone, and make a mockery of time and geography. They slide up on their homophones and show up unannounced. They reveal themselves as path and labyrinth and minotaur, those foldings and kisses and spent breaths. Loosed in winds and sediment, leaking letters through the pages, carved into clay and stone. The slick ones, the secret ones, the unpalatable mouthfuls, the signals and incantations: they need coaxing to the call. At the very least they are a sort of punctuation, a visit to the dictionary or the author’s curriculum vitae. Maybe a rope to keep you out.

This would have been a tirade about a particular type of writer that was really about a particular writer had I gone off as expected. Though some of it was based on broad ideals and craft lore feels about writing, it was really another exercise in bewilderment and envy, there are just some turns my mind can’t get around. It ends up another hill where I’m left for dead. Some strange sad bent, the aimless archiving of these awful moments, suicide jags and the curling smoke. How little hay these haymakers make. How oddly parsed, how unnecessarily put. Some pawned off bauble, gaudy in the light. Some recovered relic, a glory again revealed. A stranger right there, spoken aloud.