|
{what is a sentence?} michael bazzett What is a sentence? It is a paradox: a finished thought. It is predicated upon this impossibility, persisting across the blank stare of milled paper, continuing past the mild caress of that tadpole, quiet comma. It is a column of dark insects seething left to right to right a wrong or write a smidgen of an endlessly feathering mind upon the page. It is the black and hungering trail that menaces the picnic, the number of imprisoned days until the pale figure walks blinking into the light or down that windowless hallway toward the charred chair. It is the invisible momentum that saves the heroine when Dick finally let’s her have it, when he swings his leg mightily and kicks Jane the ball. It is continuation contained, the pulse that funnels through the hyphen: here it is – there it goes – the period following much too brief, no more than a black dot to end this something made of nothing: this scaffolding to house the wind, this quiet building into song. |
