describing description

books: robert hass, j.m. coetzee

words: autumn, awe-tumbling, reverent, hopeful-realistic, the space between exhilaration-exhaustion-contentment

photo: a map of the alluvial content of the mississippi river

i feel misled and manipulated by words, ashamed of the way that the vague sound of night-whispering eludes me, unable to articulate precisely the way that the sunlight dapples through the trees - aspens? - that we lie beneath, impotent when trying to describe the line that pulls my sternum and my elbows and the small of my back towards the corresponding parts of your body. in describing, one becomes apart from the action rather than a part of it; in defining the rivers, you do not swim in them, you could never swim in them, the rivers that are so effortlessly traced as the arc of your wrist follows the horizon -- outlining the smokestacks, the blurred-traffic-line reflection of the city on the black water, the course of the ferry. another definition of describe is "to make the mark on the surface," to physically follow the line between my gut to yours.

we watched one man fish off the dock on the northwest arm. "anything biting?" "no," he says; he does not look at us. "just passing time."

we watched, from the bridge, the moon rise orange over the other side of the water. "would you say that the moon is being spat out of the land, or that it is being pulled out?" after a pause for real thought, he says "i think it is crawling out." and with that, we dropped the picture, the outline of the small city we had so irrationally described with long black scrawls of smoke and reflection, into the water. it flew through the finite dark night and, when it reached the ocean, was still: a white light in the inky black.