Meditation

MEDITATION

I listen to the dark zero in my skull. It sounds like ink filling a white dot on a black sheet of paper. Sometimes it is a punctuation mark with little dark wings; it does not fly, blinks like an eyelash. I always wait for the first letter to appear on the page. And when it does, it shakes its fist up at me. At times, language wants to be dressed in a suit, white necktie. But I prefer a pause between ink and letter when words are silent, unclothed. The clock on the wall swallows a fly, and I see tiny legs struggle between the teeth of a number. Somewhere inside the dark, a shadow tries to lighten the dot on the letter i. The shadow rubs it against paper; it smears instead. This is what I like about language. The way one folds sentences, and feels the bones of words, letters crack; then unfolds them, tiny dark pieces that reconnect again on the page. I do not like to go past the period, because language resists death. Because underneath, bones, subject, and verb, wait to be revealed. The way one can erase milk to find calcium; the way an erased letter on the page dries into white. The top of the letter i is not a tiny round mark made by or as if by a pointed instrument. It can be a round letter, a blank zero, or an unwritten circle. Imagination is an equation: x and y can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. You were an unnatural birth, she said. I was a letter in the center of an o; born and pulled out, head shaped like a punctuation mark at the sentence's end.


Orlando White