47

The thing that I’m after, it’s unspeakable. Every poem is the same poem because I can’t seem to say what I’m trying to. And because what I’m trying to say isn’t made in language and is only gestured to. I want to write to you about that opening, how it slips through my hands. The mouth that traces a word—how can description get there? To its own outside, the place behind the camera, the place made by being unuttered, by being unfilmed, the next-to-the-thing that somehow drops off, lips unopening. I mean the door that we make out of our two edges, the sometimes-possibility of sitting down to speak or carving out time for a short call, or not carving anything but calling anyway. I’m thinking of that movement, the silent question that marks a long series of beginnings. Exegesis of the outside. Before we begin, notice what’s already here: breath, a few little jars, the sound of pencil. How can we write about love without language itself being broken, unmoored? The point of love (and writing) is to be changed.