December 23, 2025

Softest of Tongues

To many things I’ve said the word that cheats the lips and leaves them parted (thus: prash-chai which means ‘good-bye’) — to furnished flats, to streets, to milk-white letters melting in the sky; to drab designs that habit seldom sees, to novels interrupted by the din of tunnels, annotated by quick trees, abandoned with a squashed banana skin; to a dim waiter in a dimmer town, to cuts that healed and to a thumbless glove; also to things of lyrical renown perhaps more universal, such as love. Thus life has been an endless line of land receding endlessly. . . . And so that’s that, you say under your breath, and wave your hand, and then your handkerchief, and then your hat. To all these things I’ve said the fatal word, using a tongue I had so tuned and tamed that — like some ancient sonneteer — I heard its echoes by posterity acclaimed. But now thou too must go; just here we part, softest of tongues, my true one, all my own. . . . And I am left to grope for heart and art and start anew with clumsy tools of stone.