The End of Talk
Drinking tempranillo at her laptop, a woman pretends to talk
by jabbing keys. The wind does nothing but talk at branches or rippling metal roof, whose backtalk is not like the shrug of a teenager who refuses to talk about whatever texted squabble chilled her to the root. Tock of starlings in the aural foreground, bark of a neighbor’s frantic lab for a bass line, all talk no bite upon the dental consonant beginning “talk,” that’s amateur linguistics talk for the tongue’s assault to the rear of the teeth. The maple talks with restless green hands. The woman thinks she should have used “green” instead of “talk” for the ringing bell of this epistrophe, calling her to a temple where only an unaffiliated priest strolling by will talk about endings. She’s here to avoid a conversation with a certain widow who has decided not to grieve until caught up with the ironing. Some women choose smalltalk or diaries, blogging, Facebook chat instead of thinking about the dead. This woman in particular, talk about repression—if she really wanted to talk she could at least use the first person. Instead there’s no one. Just pines in the temple garden, laughing privately, talking with their backs to her, resinous needles muffling the ground, which longs for talk though its mouth is choked with decay.
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