I’ve been thinking about words.
Specifically, my ability—or sometimes inability—to string them together in a way that transmits an idea, not just expresses it. Because expression is only half the equation. If I don’t consider the recipient, my intention may be intact, but the success is suspect.
I’m reminded of Leonard Cohen laboring over a single song. The melody was complete, most of the lyrics in place. But he was unsatisfied. One word—just one—refused to settle. The song remained unfinished for eighteen months. I’ve never written songs, but I’ve stood in that same gap. Staring at a sentence. Knowing the shape of what I mean, but not the sound.
There are limits, of course. Constraints of syllable, tone, context. And then there’s the limit imposed by the artist’s own ear—sometimes the most stubborn of all.
I admit I’m a selfish purveyor of words. I arrange them for my own listening. Sometimes I forget the audience entirely. I write to hear the resonance for myself, and only later wonder if anyone else was tuned in.
There’s a half-truth often repeated about Eskimos having 147 words for snow. The number drifts depending on the teller—50, 100, 300—but what lingers is the idea: that where something matters, language proliferates. And yet we try to survive on “love” and a handful of adjectives. As if one word could carry so many types of longing, devotion, loss, hunger.
Still, some poets find a way.
I once heard Leonard Cohen recite this, between songs at a concert:
“I heard of a man
Who says words so beautifully
That if he only speaks their name
Women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body
While silence blossoms like tumors on our lips
It’s because I hear a man climb stairs
And clear his throat outside our door.”
I was floored. I waited for the song. It wasn’t one. It was a poem from his first book, written decades earlier. And in those few lines he did what I struggle to do—held contradiction and tenderness in the same breath.
I am sometimes reduced to quoting. Scraps, fragments, remembered brilliance. A serial quoter, maybe, drawn from the paucity of connection. (That phrase, at least, is mine.)
Perhaps it comes back to motive. I write to scratch an itch. To organize fog. To amuse myself with a half-clever turn. But I also, secretly, want someone to peek through the curtain.
Maybe that’s all we’re really doing when we write. Not answering the “big questions.” Not changing the world. Just leaving the curtain slightly open.
Just enough.
A Work Progressing 