Just south of here sits the staid storehouse
that safeguards recovered fragments
of leftover meaning
that couldn’t make the leap—
those bone-deep understandings
that float away like ash
as a phrase passes from German to Hindi,
or from Turkish to Thai.
They come with butterfly nets
to rescue the fluttering phonemes
and load them into the truck
for the trip back to Peoria
where they are carefully shelved
according to what they failed to convey—
hurt, beauty, spirit,
or that certain texture of snow.
There they sit, sometimes for centuries,
until the world finally learns how hygge feels,
or knows the angst of Weltschmerz,
and they are released again into the wild
and are found.
Erik Jacobsen has a degree in Music (Composition) from Williams College. He is the founder and creative director of Threestory Studio (threestory.com), an information design shop in Silicon Valley, California, and currently works in real estate marketing. He and his wife are the parents of five wonderful children who keep leaving the nest. His poetry has been published by BYU Studies, Wayfare, and now, Irreantum.
