the descriptive injury

some­one asked her what she was look­ing at
as she stood in front of the large pic­ture win­dow in the kitchen
in the abode where she present­ly resid­ed—
the ques­tion came aloud from an­oth­er room,
as if the ques­tion­er was busy them­selves & on­ly in pass­ing
did they see the girl stand­ing
with eyes fo­cused,
arms at her sides,
as if in a pri­vate state of won­der
(& why a pri­vate state of won­der seems to be am­ple food for the
pop­u­lar & pub­lic, pedan­ti­cal­ly pre­pos­ter­ous, who prey up­on the
rest of us—we’ll nev­er know) &
so with­out hes­i­ta­tion they ram­bled out their com­ment,
not stick­ing around a mo­ment for an an­swer &
as if that it­self was not an an­swer to such a ques­tion,
the girl stand­ing in front of the win­dow
ne­glect­ed to say any­thing, in­stead,
tak­ing an ex­tra mo­ment to en­joy what it was that she
had been pri­vate­ly con­cerned with,
what­ev­er im­ages ap­peared out there
that her own sense of sen­so­ry per­cep­tion
was de­vour­ing, free of the bab­ble
swirling all around,
in­ces­sant­ly—

it would have been an in­jury to them both
to at­tempt a de­scrip­tion,
to bring what it was that com­pelled the girl to si­lence
(if she had not chose si­lence be­fore­hand—one out­side can nev­er be sure)
to for­mu­late an im­age, to dis­pel some kind of phys­i­cal qual­i­ties ver­bal­ly
which to the per­son out­side
might have made some im­pres­sion up­on them,
be­cause that unique al­lure­ment of which the girl did fo­cus
could nev­er tru­ly be brought in­to any kind of dis­tinc­tion for the rest of us,
in fact to try would on­ly taint it & do a dis­ser­vice to the whole of the
event—
rather, even a more con­sid­er­ate on­look­er, who stopped when cross­ing in­to the oth­er room, in or­der to ask the girl about her mo­ment in awe,
would on­ly force a quick death to what was hap­pen­ing,
like wak­ing up from a dream in­volv­ing the two,
nei­ther can make the oth­er un­der­stand
any­thing but the at­tempt at un­der­stand­ing,
for what is to be un­der­stood
ex­ists sole­ly on its own—right out there in the fo­cus,
or it lies dead in our sav­age
de­scrip­tion—

and when the ques­tion­er came back af­ter a few min­utes,
un­sat­is­fied with the ab­sence of any an­swer
(as so many of us im­pa­tient im­be­ciles are),
af­ter turn­ing, the girl spoke a few phras­es
which to the ques­tion­er seemed on­ly non­sense at best,
as if she’d been spo­ken to in a lan­guage that she didn’t know—
what had been said was sim­ply a de­scrip­tion al­so,
one that felt on­ly like an­oth­er in­stall­ment,
a domi­no in the fall­ing, pre­dictable ef­fect,
where­in one per­son tries to get at the heart of the mat­ter,
while the oth­er tries to help them &
a mil­lion con­ver­sa­tions be­gin, part ways &
be­gin again,
con­stant­ly pick­ing up the ba­ton & then drop­ping it,
be it like the bore­dom of reread­ing a “choose your own ad­ven­ture” book,
or a fresh new mis­take
found when the col­li­sion of the selves with­in
mess up the over­all sta­bil­i­ty of the
whole.