Some days, anything is wonderful. In its
detail, in its conception, in its chainlink leading
into the rest of the physical and conceptual cosmos, anything
is wonderful. I'm reading
how the Quechua, in Peru, have a thousand words
for "potato." A thousand! For the new ones
with a skin still as thin as mosquito-wing, for
troll-face ones, for those sneaky burgundy corkscrews
like a devil's dick . . . And there can be
the opposite, yes. There can be a country
with a word like peynisht. It's said in a whisper.
Peynisht was the place political prisoners were sent,
a bleak wind-damaged plain, and by a history
of reference, peynisht has come to mean
the labor they perform there (for they're sent there yet),
a labor only found in teh state-of-being called peynisht,
a daily toil without relief of any kind, or hope of pardon,
just this side of unbearable — peynisht is that
specific: the labor there, as exactly close to unbearable
as labor can be without crossing fatally over.
There's the sound of wind in the word, a wind with
salt inside that's whipped like spurs across people.
You might think it would the perfect word
for loose appropriation — so a sour marriage,
a spat-embittered office job, a night of terrible
string-quartet performances in a room so small you
can't scratch . . . the way we use "hellish," these
would be peynisht. But it isn't so. It's only
that literal place and the literal spirit-deadening effort
to avoid the clubs. He goes to the pile of stone,
and carries stone, and does nothing but carry stone
in a world without one friend or minute of respite
and when it's dark he returns
to the dirt floor and its shit hole and
they throw him a pan of bad water and a raw potato.
He eats it. And there's only one word.