Old Man Overflowing with Phrases

lao qu shi pian hun man yu

 

Meaning has its own existence.

Names for things that don’t exist

As things can make meanings

That do exist. You should talk

About fairies and God and qi.

“Triple air signs” may be airless,

But as signs they exist, and more

Significantly, as human-shared signs

They’re vortices of meanings that are

Real as meanings, and all meanings,

Including those that swirl around

Measured and experienced things

Such as warm breezes, gene mutations,

And gravity, as meanings, equally exist,

Except insofar as some are older or fading

Or still growing increasingly complex.

The ontologies of meaningful signs

And phrases shimmer over level plains.

Aspects of the most vivid meanings

Of some phrasings are just those aspects

That can only ever exist as meanings—

Visits to the land beyond death,

Conversations with the supernatural

Deity who holds dear your every breath—

And it’s the wild fecundity of meaning

That allows human phrasing to overflow

The arid ontological shorelines

Of the rest of what exists. Meanings

Can be made to exist. We can conjure

Them into existence. As such,

They, and they alone among the masses

And energies of our apparent universe,

Can also be lost. If not poetry, what is?