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{fish out of water} anthony dimatteo What's in a word? Wrong question - more like what's a word in or up to. They are ghostlike, nothing inside, flitting about and believed in, revenants singing along, yes, a revery comes to mind. One can drift down a river of revery in a venal or rever- ential state or take every refer- ence to venery as a slurry thickening dreams with clay. And what of the word decline? Are these our declining years? Is our slinky approaching the bottom step? Then again, the most loving and fanciest invitation can be denied: "I'm inclined to feel ordered to come. I thus decline." And the years one spends declining dead nouns, propping them up like broken toadstools! How about seduction in verse that goes nowhere, the beloved refusing your horizon , declining to recline? "Beware the decline" should be posted on summits - the way up so slow, the way down, so quick, the more padded one is. Democritus's theory of the clinamen too, the most extravagant curtsey an atom can take, depicts a zigzag slope downwards rudely into nothing, the ultimate incline that cannot be declined though the very river's ride's at stake. |
