Desire Before Language

Story poem 1 of 100

I have watched a seedling
in a cellar
bend toward one thin crack
in the stone.
Nobody taught it
the word for light.
The bending came first.
If a name ever arrives,
it arrives late,
the way maps arrive
after the country
has already been walked.

We begin the same way.
An infant turns her face
toward warmth she cannot pronounce.
A child stands at a window
wanting something
that has no word yet,
distance, maybe,
or the sound of a life
she has not met.
The want is already articulate.
It speaks in the body's grammar,
a reach, and the direction
the eyes keep returning to.

Language shows up later
and offers to explain.
Be careful with the offer.
Words are useful servants
with ambitions of their own.
Some of the words offered
for your wanting
will come from people
who never felt it,
and a want renamed by strangers
becomes easier to govern.

A desire that cannot account
for itself
is often treated as a fault.
I think it is closer to testimony.
It records who you were
before anyone gave you instructions.
What you reached for in the dark,
unprompted,
is some of the most honest
evidence you own,
because it predates your training
in what you were supposed to want.

None of this crowns every appetite.
Some wanting, followed blindly,
eats the very thing it loves.
A first desire deserves a hearing,
and a hearing includes hard questions,
what will this cost, who pays it.

But start by admitting
the bending is real.
The seedling does not apologize
for bending before it can say sun.
When your word finally comes,
and it may take years,
cut it to the size of the longing
rather than trimming the longing
to fit the word.

You were fluent long before
you could speak.