inadequacy

How to put this, when you never listen to the things I so badly want and don't want to say?

That when I speak to you I'm a small shark swimming around and around an uninhabited island.


Toothless, to no avail.

*       *       *

Speaking is difficult and one tries
To be exact and yet not to
Exact the prime intention to death.
On the other hand the appearance of things
Must not be made to mean another
Thing. It is a kind of triumph
To see them and to put them down
As what they are. The inadequacy
Of the living, animal language drives
Us all to metaphor and an attempt
To organize the spaces we think 
We have made occur between the words.

--W. S. Graham, from 'Approaches to how they behave' in Collected Poems 1942-1947 (London: Faber, 1979), p. 170.

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