Thursday, November 16, 2017

Epistemology by Catherine Barnett

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord 
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle, 
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees 
      communicate, 
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are 
      ailing. 
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. 
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for 
      another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to 
      connect 
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare, 
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.