As If a Bird Flew By Me: A Novel

Questions from the Spoken to the Unspoken World

63 QUESTIONS FROM THE SPOKEN TO THE UNSPOKEN WORLD (the cellist to her husband) You can place the hot, red flower of a nasturtium on your tongue like a petalled sacrament, you can create cacophony or melody with a stroke of a bow over strings, you can trace the edge of your dog’s soft, brown ear— Yet, sometimes, there is a scent on the wind that you can’t quite place, that triggers a memory you can’t quite discern, and the distance between Here, the place you sit, and There, the drawer in your mind, poorly alphabetized, moted by dust—the distance is beyond any tangible plane. Sometimes the cat appears to see it, the trajectory into the Other. Nothing can have shape, fragrance, texture, right? I’m oblivious to most of the world’s turning gears. What I know is that the rosehips are burnishing like tiny persimmons, that the geese have begun to line up in their first tentative tendrils, and that the ways that I love you can seem contradictory, and I just don’t have the right vocabulary you so greatly deserve, yet I lean into the chasm with you, my dear, the world with its innumerable transactions for joy. ...