Think about it, wrote Wendy.
There’s no such thing as a fish.
She explained how the word
is a catch all for species
that do not hail from the same source,
they just happen to live in the water.
And I think about how we use any word—
as if to name is to know. This is a fish, we say.
This is a friend. This is moon. This is shadow.
And this is love, a word
we sometimes toss from our tongues
as if it were ketchup or curtain,
cranberry, lichen or crane.
There’s no such thing as love,
I think. It’s a catch all for these unclassifiable feelings
we don’t know how to name.
( ), wrote Jack,
and I wanted to write it back to him
in exactly the same way, but with words—
some glorious, speakable phrase
that might say how grateful I am
to swim together in the same water,
in this precise time, in this precise place,
and how his words make it easier
to be grateful for life, easier to attune
to what we are—not fish. Not moons.
Not tables. Not shadows,
but communities of trillions
and trillions of cells that co-exist, who knows why,
all of us spilling out of our parentheses.
Well, Jack, though it’s hard to improve on blank,
I love you, even if there’s no such thing.
Or as you might say, I luff you, I loof you,
and I love, too, your words, which are never just words—
love how they never point to anything,
not really, and how they mean everything.