WHAT MEANING MEANS

Where you see a vine, I see the flight path of a pair of leaves.* 

WHAT MEANING MEANS 

Giving up on giving up is a better choice,

when being sensible and clear are futile.

Words would lose meaning, ours will not. 

Where you see a vine leading its tendrils

up to a broken branch shedding a last leaf,

you make me see its undulant plummet 

to the parched pond mottled by blackened

and brittle leaves long dead even before

the end of this long hot summer. It is real. 

Is this not our faultless way of knowing

what we pretend to know when we can

no longer see the dancer from the dance? 

Would not the falling of that lonely leaf

trace the slower climb of a clinging vine?

Like seeing both sides of the wall at once. 

---Albert B. Casuga

08-07-11 

*Prompt: Where you see a vine, I see the flight path of a pair of leaves. ---From “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” by Dave Bonta, Via Negativa, 08-06-11