When I hear someone say
“It’s not the end of the world.”
I think of the image of time as a line
And a lifetime as a line segment.
There are so many expressions invoking images
I often get lost from the conversation
Thinking about the literal meaning of the words.
Perhaps I have a touch of autism.
Last week my Korean ESL student got frustrated
Reading a story that said the person acted
Out of
frustration. To him that made no sense.
Why not in
frustration? I understand.
When I was a boy numbers and logic made sense.
I learned new words as mathematical concepts.
Later I was confused upon hearing those same words
Holding some alternate meaning outside math.
My favorite poet as a young man was a linguist
Separating out the phonemes and morphemes
Combining them into words like atoms into molecules
While the roots of his words became roots in the ground.
Sometimes this language is foreign to my ear
And what I hear is just the intonation and rhythm.
Sometimes the letters on the page are strange characters
What the typographers call Greek.
A poem begins “Moon, cantilever of syllables”
And I see an enormous dipthong bridge
Spanning the Milky Way transporting me
Far out into the endless universe.
