The World Is Made of Conversations

Last fall Oakley wrote a poem called "Expressions." It spoke of the way we're all connected, how a kind of narrative thread runs through all of the world--our bodies, our spirits, the places we inhabit, the people we meet on the street, the bench we sit on in the park, the ducks on the pond we watch from that bench, the pond. I know I'm mixing up several of his poems--he has written so many memorable ones, and he is all of 18!

Here are a few passages from the poem:

The world is made of conversations;
Slips of the tongue birth children,
The inflection of the word
Crashing, calling into the other,
The idea becoming the leaf
That falls into a puddle
And changes into a skeleton,
A statement upon the world...

In the darkness
Voices instinctively fill with light
And begin to share themselves with one another;
It is customary to reach out with inflection
And feel the bodies ambling through
The corridors of the earth;
The schools,
The cathedrals filling up with prayer,
The hospitals withholding laughter,
The graveyards settling the dead,
The streets that never accommodate silence...

The world is made of conversations.
A person becomes the world
The various afflictions,
The wars that shatter children,
The moments of love that violate
The chemistry of the heart,
The suicide of summer into autumn,
And speaks about it in order to create another.

"The world is made of conversations." The way he said that moved me. It told the truth in a new way. It inspired the collage above, in whose wrinkled surface I embedded that sentence. The painting sold, happily, the very day it hung in the gallery, to a physician/author.

Now that I'm part of the blogosphere, those words have still more meaning to me. I count myself lucky to have found this world, where the conversations never end. Where a single thread of thought can wrap itself around the world, become entangled with other threads, and return the next day, enlarged, sparkling.

If you've made it this far, kindly proceed to "Inside the Pyramid." I seem to be in a blogging frenzy today.