Selections from the collection Is That What That Is, Main Street Rag, 2017
Nothing to Say
He had nothing to say, he said,
adding only that saying so
was in itself finally beautiful and true.
That was his message. It was
something no one else had ever said
quite the way he was saying it.
Many thought they heard a quiet
sort of unexceptional wisdom in it
and nodded their heads in agreement,
nodded their heads to the music of it,
which wasn’t an easy music per se,
not the kind you’d get up and dance to,
or beat a drum to, or hum to yourself
in an abstracted sort of way. But it grew
louder. So when his enemies and detractors
tried to silence him, they couldn’t silence him.
Because he had nothing to say.
They could only scratch their heads and listen.
Deaf and Dumb
The Deaf man in the waiting room
asks me how long I’ve been working
as an interpreter. I tell him
many years. Awesome, he says.
We sit there chatting, waiting
for the doctor to come.
He tells me a little about himself.
His parents and grandparents are Deaf.
His siblings are Deaf. His two young children
are fourth generation Deaf. The hereditary
master status of a kind of Deaf aristocracy
in the Deaf world. I am duly
impressed. My turn to say: Awesome.
He is getting his Ph.D. in sociolinguistics.
His signing is graceful, fluid, symphonic–
like water everywhere seeking its own
level. Chatting him up in the waiting room
is a pure joy, one of the perks
of my profession.
But the doctor is dumb about Deaf people.
In the little examining room
he doesn’t address the Deaf man directly
but tells me to “tell him” this, “ask him” that.
The Deaf man notices, tells the doctor
to tell him himself, in the second person.
But the doctor doesn’t know what the second person is.
He examines the Deaf man but he doesn’t
see him. He doesn’t look in his eyes.
He says to say “Ahh,” but the Deaf man
refuses to vocalize, mouth wide open,
fists forming at his sides, uvula
hanging there like a punching bag,
silent and motionless,
while we wait.
Miracles
Spiritual texts are the most boring books in the world.
None of them mentions a bicycle
or a Ferris wheel, or baseball, or sea lions, or ice cream.
They just lump them all together into “the world.”
The “world of appearances.” The “world of illusions.”
You can walk through this world and not
believe it for a minute. You can get to the end of it
and not believe that either. The miracle is seeing
right through the world to another
world that’s right here, right now.
But you have to let go of everything.
You have to let go of everything—you can
start by letting go of these words, just let them
go. Let them fall through the air, skim
your knee, spill to the floor. How to read these words
when they’re lying on the floor face-down
like bodies? That is the seeming difficulty.
You can sit in a small room all alone with your body
and not believe it for a minute. You can
don the humble hospital gown that closes in the back,
and when the doctor comes in with his numbers
which are your numbers, you can
not believe that either. You can let them fall from his lips,
skim your ear, pool on the floor where your eyes
and his eyes have fallen. He won’t
mention the bicycle, or the Ferris wheel which is
taking up a lot of room right now in the little
examining room where a sea lion has clambered up
onto the table and is barking, and the baseballs are flying,
and the vendors are hawking ice cream—because he can’t
see them. He can’t perform a miracle.
Paul Hostovsky‘s latest book of poems is Pitching for the Apostates (Kelsay, 2023). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net Awards. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com)
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