As a writer, the unarticulated language of each day is what I try to comprehend. Gray grammar, revealing run-on sentences, naughty nouns, veritable verbs, placid paragraphs, excited exclamations, or periods big as moons – I try to comprehend the meld of minutes and hours, but all of it without words, until I begin to think about meaning. But it’s never close enough, this thinking in images, to relive the day. It’s not the whole, not for a person who spends her life following a trail of breadcrumb words constantly picked apart by the birds in my mind, birds of short attention spans who flutter in and flutter off.
I try to pin each day to the page. I run after the squiggly pen marks that scamper off and disappear, my thought unfinished. I try to make every thought come together in the center; I try to herd them, one slow word at a time. I try to leave a tangible record of where I have been and where I might likely be found in the terrain of my mind. I watch the hourglass drip grain after grain of sand. I bend my head closer to the page; push my pen faster as a dusky rose light fades in the west and the moon sets into a blanket of black trees standing in a pool of fog.
ABOUT ELEPHANTS 