I read the news today

Billboard by Burhan Dogancay, 1964, Guggenheim Museum

Size: 58.1x50.2 cm Medium: Gouache, ink, and paper collage

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, Consular Corps Committee of the City of New York, Department of Public Events, 1965 © Burhan Dogancay

i think about this in a kiss, how we purse our lips, how we press into each other, how kiss is a small word for an action that feels big - i think about how we have french kiss, how we have a smack on the cheek, a peck. i think about this when we make eye contact, how we have “a moment” that passes between two people like an envelope, one that reads of more, more, more - i think of who gave us the names for obscure things. how shakespeare gave us elbow, and what did we call it beforehand. 

what word is there for the way your eyes look when you talk about your favorite thing. we have phosphorescence, the property of emitting light, but that’s not right. what word is there for how it feels with the floor against your back while you’re watching sunbeams filter dust motes. there’s languid, relaxed, but that doesn’t work. what word is there for how it feels beside your best friend, listening to them laugh, knowing this moment is a pocket that keeps all of the good things inside, one i will tuck myself into again and again, one i am somehow distant from even though i’m enjoying it: watching the moment become a memory i think of fondly, even while it’s happening. 

there’s kissing, there’s leaning in, there’s words for summer and fireflies in jars and fall creeping in. there’s words for leaves and the smoke in the air from breathing and there’s words for the fire of a sunset on an autumn evening. i think about how we made words for things. the oxford dictionary gives us 171,476 current words to make sense of things. how we let poets give us syllables for how it feels to fall into someone’s arms (melting) and someone who talks a lot (gregarious) and vast burning (conflagration). the beauty of language is we have a word for that until we don’t have a word for that and then poetry comes in.