Silent Film Without Music

What if you watched a movie in a language that you don’t understand and are asked to
communicate the plot to someone who has never grasped what you are saying, said the poet,
laughing at a familiar predicament. The faces and feet offer no clues. Suppose talking about the
movie reminds you of the first person whose tongue touched yours and said kissing is like rolling
little migraine pillows around on the floor when no one is looking, and that being in love is like
trying to understand a silent movie that no one has ever described accurately. All that exists are
the pages upon pages of words that have been written about it, bound in embossed and numbered
volumes. What has puzzled the scholars who have pored over these tomes is that each
description denies the existence of all the others, so that one has never been able to summarize
the plot or lack of one, fragments of fragments, some of them marked only by the shadows of
clouds that were in the sky that day, not so long ago, before memory had become a phantom
limb.
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