Because names change meaning. Because we hear cries from next door like birdsong at dawn and stay silent. Stay silent on repeat. How unmoved we are when possessors manage their possessions. How accepting we are that there is one. It seems natural. As a noun takes a verb. An owner takes back his things. Takes them apart if he chooses. And silence taking form. The likeness to a familiar act—the relation between someone’s hand and a taken object—renders it natural. Thus it is a natural law. Another natural law describes a balloon taking air from another
which is Laplace’s law. Pronounced: la-plass.
It states what happens when a balloon human-
head-sized is connected to one fist-sized.
My mnemonic was that the statement was
counterintuitive. But I do not remember what
is intuitive. I know one of the two grows.
But does the bigger balloon gulp the other
in like a bullfrog eating its own spawn
or does the bigger one shrink like a lit pupil,
in the light of revelation, and share its air?
I had other mnemonics, but for characters
such as one translating to harbor—
water radical rhymed to togetherness
floating above a curling tine—
but mnemonics rhymed with time
blur, and repetition becomes necessary:
Laplace’s law the big balloon gets
bigger the small one disappears
Laplace’s law the big balloon gets
bigger the small one disappears
Laplace’s law the big balloon gets
bigger the small one disappears
and there is only so much repetition
before one thinks it must occur
like the news about the big country eating
the harbor city
that bloomed
with umbrellas
before they shuttered
still it rained—
at this point, I will mention a few characters
that mean nothing and so I beg your pardon:
the storyteller populating my head I beg your pardon
the siren with sphinx’s eyes I beg your pardon
the man falling falling from the twenty-fourth floor
whose Cantopop songs I could not understand
but memorized I beg your pardon
the royal court that flung itself in defiance
or despair into this bay from boats of their
last
harbor
(water radical rhymed to togetherness
floating above a curling tine)
in a pattern that must be natural must be law
that writes into law the way a child’s jaw
aches into adulthood
how these patterns of what happens
become aligned to the basic part
of knowledge, which only knows
how blowing a balloon is hard at first
(when still small) when the mouth-
and-cheeks coordinate to purse like a fish
as if readying to say the word who or hù
(as in $ف home
or 护 to protect, to defend)
but without voicing with muteness
with pushing the body
resistance falling away once the balloon some-
what inflates (when it has larger radius)
meaning it is not the larger body wanting to
consume more air
it is the smaller body wanting to push into
its own heart and disappear
it is the smaller body wanting to push into
its own heart and disappear
but the smaller body wanted so much to live
and named itself by rhyming water
with togetherness
and I can even visit the harbor city with that name. The name has stayed. How it now means silence. As in: a radio silence. A moment of silence. A silencer. A cry like a birdsong and then silence. Whose cry—hearing—silence is part of natural law. Like the law that when I beat the wall in anger, the wall beats back. When I open my throat and let out silence, silence opens back. When I look over at the window blinds, they send blindness back. But there is another natural law that says to wait. Wait long enough, and you will get another sunrise, another flock of mourning doves, cooing like names drained of meaning. Names drained of sound.
_____
The word harbor is the English translation of the character 港. This forms part of the name 香港, which is transliterated from Cantonese as Hong Kong.
