Benches

“Let’s go sit on the bench in the park for a few minutes” she will say when my mumbling turns into tongues with greater volume, the pitch going up and up. I know when I am scaring her. I am scared too. What is going on that so much sound comes from me with out being words that neither she nor I can understand.

But it is I who create them, and if they rebound the walls louder and louder won’t they make sense to their own creator? How not? More volume, higher pitch; quicker and then slower, and then moving into the corner, yelling to the walls, to bounce back into my ears more loudly. Yes? Shouldn’t that make sense now? It doesn’t.

She says, “This happens when you get too far into your notebook scritchy scratchings  on whatever that mathematics thing is that you obsess about. Why do you have to do that? Can’t you just do crossword puzzles?”

The answer is no. My mind has a purpose, or certainly its own will. Why else all these symbols, drawings, rhymes and equations in my notebooks? Why else this throat singing as she calls it when we return from the bench.

I will go out there with her and look down at my shoes until she is satisfied and says, “OK, let’s go back in.”

Desperation let me always know
how to welcome you?
and put in your hands the torch
to burn down the house. Rumi