A Poem on Language, Perfectly Encapsulating What Language Means to Me

There Is No Word

By Tony Hoagland

There isn't a word for walking out of the grocery store

with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack

that should have been bagged in double layers

– so that before you are even out the door

you feel the weight of the jug dragging

the bag down, stretching thin

plastic handles longer and longer

and you know it's only a matter of time until

bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word

for that vague sensation of something

moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity

– which is too bad, because that is the word

I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend

as the awareness grows in me that he is

no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort –

until this moment, when as we say goodbye

I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached

the end of a pretense,

though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about

is my gratitude for language –

how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;

how it will move, if not inside, then

around the circumference of almost anything –

how, over the years, it has given me

back all the hours and days, all the

plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets

I have willingly poured into it.

* * * * *

The aim of a lot of poems, especially in contemporary poetry, is to point out a universal truth by providing the reader with very specific details. The poet Tony Hoagland puts his love of language on explicit display in the above piece, "There Is No Word," and the poem succeeds, on multiple levels, in bringing his point across.

I posted my own poem about vocabulary options in various languages several years ago, but Hoagland gets at something more. His warts-and-all love of language, what it can and can't do, is evident, brought to the fore by those concluding pairings: "hours and days," "plodding love and faith," "misunderstandings and secrets." How could we not see Hoagland's tenderness and be moved?

"There Is No Word" is one of the poems I keep a copy of, for rereading whenever the mood strikes. This past weekend was just such an occasion. I had my "Favorite Poems" folder out and was reading, on the bed, more or less at random – poems by Timothy Donnelly, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucia Perillo, Vijay Seshadri, Dean Young, and, of course, Tony Hoagland. By the time I looked up at the clock, a whole hour had passed and it was time for work. I could've spent all morning there, doing only that, which is testament enough to the love I'm talking about here.

A Poem

Visitation

"I remember your son well," says one.
"We weren't friends but worked great together. He

was the perfect man to manage the front desk —
handsome and always willing to go that extra mile

for a guest." The mother smiles and nods
in the way one does, accepting condolences.

The elderly woman he's with looks elsewhere.
"How long has yours been gone?" the first mother

asks her, wincing, knowing the wound's too fresh.
The second works her toothless mouth in preparation,

then mutters, "Fifteen years last January."
She still burns a candle almost nightly,

lights a little flame for him, her youngest,
taken in his prime. And the mothers

look around them then and apprehend
the gathered. Those come to pay respects

are brothers, daughters, sisters, sons,
pals, partners, mothers too —

everyone attired for this occasion
differently. The charity jog freebie T-shirt,

the patterned dress, the hipster jeans, the inevitable
blue suit. Conversation ranges. Insurance, love

lives and lacks thereof, TV, illness, children —
one of whom looks up to see, in a flash like

a fish in an aquarium, his father's face
in the window glass. He cries out,

"Daddyyyyyy!" and the whole assembly turns
to watch him pass with Mama through

the waiting room's double steel doors.
Another family reunited for a few hours on

the prison's visiting floor.


* * * * *


The term visitation is defined by Oxford thus:

n. an official or formal visit, in particular: • (in church use) an official visit of inspection, esp. one by a bishop to a church in the bishop's diocese. • the appearance of a divine or supernatural being. • a gathering with the family of a deceased person before the funeral.

Multiple meanings of a word are like catnip for poets. I wanted to play with this one because its use by prison administrators has seeped into the vernacular. A lot of everyday people use "visitation" when they're talking about going to see little Johnny in the slammer. A lawyer or politician going to see a prisoner is one thing, but not Mom and Dad. The formality of this usage always put me off, the same way that saying "utilize" does, when "use" works perfectly well.

There are of course parallels between someone dying and someone going to prison. In the event that the sentence is life without parole (as mine is), even the courts formally acknowledge the similarity, employing the grim term "civil death" when addressing one's diminished Constitutional rights. So I set out to write "Visitation" as a poem that upends the reader's expectation — it starts out with all the trappings of a funeral gathering, then reveals the true circumstances only in the final lines. Whether or not it's successful I'll leave for you to decide.

Home

"Anywhere I lay my head, boys," sang Tom Waits, "I'm gonna call my home." Mine is not the easy sentimentality of the vagabond, however, and I'm hardly cavalier with language. What I consider home is a sanctuary, a space consecrated and made my own. It's the difference between an outhouse and a castle: one is rough-hewn and invites only the briefest of visits, the other is regal and endures. How could anyone conflate the two?

And yet, all the time I hear references to one's cell as "home." This was especially prevalent during the years that I worked in Crossroads' kitchen, around what were generally short-timers. Kids on the serving line, talking about their evening plans, let garbage like this fall out of their mouths: "I'm gonna go home and get me a shower and watch me some Empire tonight, boy!" The guys in gray weren't the only ones guilty of this slip; guards did it, too. On the rare occasions when the kitchen had a surplus of workers, "Who wants to go home?" was the question put to us. My hand always went up, but not for the reason they thought.

My cell can't be home. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States protects one's home and property against unwarranted searches and seizures, while the little concrete box in which I live is subjected to frequent turnings upside-down by uniformed goons. As if that weren't reminder enough that this is no proper home, I'm also required to share it with a stranger. (That Doyle and I get along and have simpatico routines is irrelevant.) The bed and bedding I'm allowed are terrible, the lighting sucks, I can't adjust the temperature, and the lares and penates, those treasures that make a house a home, are altogether banned. I don't even get to paint the walls a different shade of gray.

My home no longer exists. Its only remnants have been kept safe in my mother's keeping since my abduction by the state. Material goods being low on my list of concerns, I've asked her to divest herself of, or use, what she could. Someone might as well appreciate them. What's now left are several boxes of clothing, a few decorative tchotchkes, and several hundred CDs. Whatever home I'm able to build once this purgatory's past will have to be made from scratch.

If that sounds especially sad, consider that every move a person makes in a lifetime involves exactly this. The same stuff may follow from domicile to domicile, but it's not the stuff that matters. You could say that it's the arrangement of that stuff, the investment of care into establishing what comfort one desires, and the life lived around that stuff that constitutes home. My eventual freedom would include the freedom to create home on a completely featureless foundation — an exciting prospect, not one to be melancholy about.

Meanwhile, I continue referring to my cell as exactly that, the same as I reject the labels "inmate" and, worse yet, "offender" on the grounds that I'm unjustly being held captive, a prisoner. Euphemisms won't make me any less uncomfortable. Then again, why would I want to get cozy and settle in here?

More Ridiculous Administrative Typos

This is nothing new; I've written about the many unintentionally hilarious signs and memos around the prison before — in my book, for instance, or in this 2017 blog post — but this time Crossroads' revised visiting rules crossed a line. They went into effect months ago but have stared me in the face long enough that I can no longer fight the urge to share them with you. Anyway, check out this incredible twofer:

• Visitors must clear the mental detectors to enter.
• No arms are hands on the back of the chairs

Although some truly weird stuff does go down in prison, it's not quite to the sci-fi level of oddity implied by these imaginative malaprops.

Signs of Life

SECURE DOORS AT ALL TIMES
NO WARNINGS GIVEN
CDV WILL BE ISSUED

* * * * *

STATE GRAY PANTS MUST BE WORN IN BACK OFFICE AREA

* * * * *

OUT OF BOUNDS

* * * * *

CDV - Will be issued
If contaminated items are left on floor

* * * * *

ATTENTION
OFFENDERS ARE NOT TO STOP OR ATTEMPT TO STOP ANY MEDICAL STAFF FOR ANY REASON
QUESTIONS OR REQUESTS MUST BE ADDRESSED THROUGH THE MSR PROCESS

* * * * *

NO HEADGEAR
NO HEAD PHONES
No Sunglasses
FULL GRAYS

* * * * *

Tranquilidad por favor
Quiet please

* * * * *

DO NOT THROW ITEMS THROUGH DISHROOM WINDOW
CDV'S WILL BE ISSUED

* * * * *

no extra TOAST CAN BE TAKEN AT ANY TIME!!
NO EXCEPTIONS! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

* * * * *

HAND WASHING STATION

* * * * *

STAFF DINING IS OUT OF BOUNDS
Only Offenders assigned to work Staff Dining admitted without escort!
CDV's will be issued.

* * * * *

DO NOT SIT ON THIS FREEZER!

* * * * *

"NO LOITERING"

* * * * *

ATTENTION
NO BOOTS ON THE GYM FLOOR

* * * * *

ATTENTION
PICTURES ARE TAKEN ON MONDAY'S, TUESDAY'S, & WEDNESDAY'S MORNINGS AND EVENINGS!
PROTECTIVE CUSTODY MONDAY'S!

* * * * *

TRASH CAN AREA
LEAVE TRASH CANS HERE

* * * * *

PLEASE USE ONLY 7.5 AND WATER TO CLEAN MICROWAVE

* * * * *

DO NOT SLAM DRYER DOOR

* * * * *

DO NOT TWIST, BALL, OR BUNDLE CLOTHING AND TRY TO FORCE THROUGH WRINGER. NO SHOES, BOOTS OR PILLOWS IN WRINGER. DO NOT TRY TO FORCE ITEMS THROUGH WRINGER. DO NOT PUT ITEMS BIGGER THEN 1 INCH INSIDE WRINGER. YOU BREAK IT YOU PAY FOR IT.

A Poem More or Less About Borrowed Words, but Not Really

The Japanese Have Words

Words as tangled line art, words
to describe the queerest things — ideas
Western thought cannot or won’t
dignify by naming. English speakers, we’re
cozy with taxonomy, clinical verbosity, and,
if need be, eponymity (think:
the tidy indictments that are
Asperger’s syndrome,
Freudian slips,
and Crohn’s disease). But, as though ashamed
to invent our own, we ripped off
German Schadenfreude — a patch
to mend our holier-than-thou-ness.
No new offense. More recently
it took savoring Asian tongues and lips
to bring umami to the States.
O friends of the East! Tell us
crude convenience-whores
just what we’re placing in our mouths.
And clarify, if you please, our desires. Destigmatize
these private yens with your hentai and
with yaoi. The culture of otaku, too.
Here long taunted, bullied, jock-jerked into lockers
but bearing the indignity with oft-bespectacled calm, nerds in Japan
command a reverence, an almost fetishistic awe. There’s
mainstream celebration of shy organic chemists,
all-night PC programmers,
and pale-as-mushroom manga-reading shut-ins
whose barricaded doors define
hikikomori, the antisocial acme.
Gaijin may call them sad.
But me, I’m confessing that I envy them,
those vitamin-D deficients
with their honest hermetic hearts, free
to be the monkish keepers
of the true, unspoken language of the world.

* * * * *

A note on the terminology: Schadenfreude is the uniquely German term for pleasure derived from someone else’s misfortune. It’s use in English is common enough that you can now find it in most dictionaries. Umami refers to the fifth category of taste, in food (the others being, of course, salty, sweet, sour, and bitter), that of savoriness. Probably thanks to the ubiquity of cooking shows on American television, its use is also quite common in English. Hentai is an overtly sexualized subgenre of manga (comic books focused on sci-fi or fantasy themes) and anime (TV programs and movies focused on same). Yaoi is female-oriented, usually female-authored, fiction involving homoerotic (typically young) male relationships, and enjoys a surprising popularity in contemporary Japan. An otaku is a young person, usually a male, who is obsessed with computers or very specific aspects of pop culture, to the detriment of his social skills. The increasingly prevalent phenomenon of hikikomori in Japanese society has many sociologists stymied. It refers to the abnormal, extreme avoidance of social contact by what are, more often than not, adolescent males. Lastly, gaijin is the pejorative Japanese term for foreigners.

Confessions of a Word Nerd

I was born this way. Not an hour out of the womb, my parents told me, I babbled and burbled a proto-linguistic stream — there was no crying, just that innocent, excited exploration of verbosity. After months in utero and mute, I was too thrilled about the feel of random phonemes on my lips to get upset about my new, weirdly spacious accommodations.

The first German word I learned from my Würzburg-born mother was Hubschrauber — helicopter. Flattening my three-year-old tongue and curling my mouth to get those three munchy syllables out pleased me to no end. Letting the word fly from me felt like an accomplishment, so I repeated it over and over. The meaning was secondary to the sensory experience of forming it.

Today, of course, I write. And as any writer will, I hold dear a select few words. Because I like to think I'm grown up, usually it's because of their mere usefulness. (I am forever impressed with the myriad applications that exist in life for apropos and utter, and will be the first to acknowledge my own overuse thereof.) Then, though, there is that other class of words — the one which I am less beholden than infatuated by. Like comely mannequins in a window display, who catch your eye without even being alive, these words' aesthetic perfection, effervescence on my palate, or the flawless singing in my sensitive ear draws me in. I'd buy whatever they were selling.

Except these words, like mannequins, are incapable of loving me back. I can't enjoy a night on the town with the lovely aubergene — where in this country might I take her that would be sufficiently upscale? I cannot broach meaningful conversation with crepuscular, whose chilly affect stills almost any dinner table, gorgeous though she is. It's almost impossible to sit in repose with nepenthes on the sofa; certain relationships just feel forced. And although I fooled around with handsome vermilion in my teens, the attraction being undeniable as it was socially unacceptable, that's now little more than a fondly remembered stage, almost quaint, like my puppy love, Hubschrauber.

I keep my exotic unrequited loves in mind; I fantasize about them while I'm spending time with plainer prose. Sometimes I stray — an errant poetic affair here and there — and luxuriate in sibilant bliss with, say, adscititious. I mean, I'm only human and need a thrill now and again. Too bad I've got to sneak around to do it — that's all I'm saying. My beauties deserve better than to be treated like fetish objects, hidden away. Maybe I'll live to see a day when, instead of just talking about my complex feelings for melisma and metonymy, I can actually bring them to social gatherings without attracting all that jealous condemnation. A guy can dream, can't he?