Jami Macarty - The Man Who Could Not Question

Jami Macarty

The Man Who
Could Not Question

Jabber! Jabber! Jabber! How his mind talked! One day, he noticed when he was trying to ask a question, he did not know what to do or what he was supposed to do -- the words of things tossed in his head like so many pieces of lettuce ripped by his mother’s hands for the every night dinner salad. As if lettuce and hands and mother were answers.

When he tried to ask a question it would happen that his mind would answer jacket, or something like that, and then more elaborately the jacket would appear. These answers without questions, which were words of things, which were also things, tossed and tossed.

Words and things. Words and things. The mind cannot do otherwise than what it is doing.

Often, often, often the things hit the inside of his head and stretched his brain, like a net hit by an old wet tennis ball. This secret happening made his head a funny shape.

Words and things happened all day long and when he was very, very tired, when he lay down at night, when all things were quiet, the tossing increased. It was happening in his mind and he couldn’t stop it.

When he watched the things and words, things and words, he dizzied. He found he did not have the tenacity to look there for long.

He decided to stand. He decided to move. He stood and stood and stood and moved. He had answers, but did not know to which questions they corresponded. Puzzles have at least two pieces, but he had only one. Puzzles have pieces. Answers have questions.

His mother sent him to a place where others who have answers to questions never asked go. These places are called institutions. At the institution, he sat with the Keeper of Questions.

He sat with the Keeper of Questions every day, every day monotonous like the flowers of mother’s wallpaper. He answered box and egg and oyster and eye and poppy. His mind was full of goods that open.

He liked to introspect at the institution windows. A cloud was once in the sky and he looked at it. He reached for it. He was trying to go upwards, to reach and reach and reach and expand.

Once his arms came out of the heavens, the answers came out of his mind and into his hands. The things and words tossed. The things and words rose and fell in his hands.

And just like that he knew. He decided to be like the man he saw at the circus. It is easier for a juggler than it is for man inside his mind.

Juggler and well done! Emptying, emptier, empty the jetsam of his mind.

Juggler now holds a cloud in one hand and the word cloud in the other. Like a blind one Juggler must touch a thing to know what it is. The thing in the left hand and the word for the thing in the right. This was a puzzle he could do.

Things and words. Things and words. While in the air is also a bird and also another word. First, first and details. A jingo. A jinx of a bird for it flies and Juggler makes it fly.

In the air continually as all jugglers know. When Juggler takes your hand, you fly too! Juggler has all answers. Life is good when it is.

Jami Macarty teaches contemporary poetry and poetics in the English Department and the Writing & Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University. Poems from her first manuscript, The Notion of Hollow That Underlies Both Worlds, have been published in The Café Review, Salt River Review, Spork, and Volt, among others. She has poems forthcoming in Cimarron Review and The Diagram.