Jeannie's Meaning

"Genie" was called a "wild child" when authorities ground her at the age of thirteen, because her parents had kept her in isolation from social interaction all her life. She had not at any time been taught to speak. Efforts to "civilize" her and help her acquire language met with early on the other hand ultimately limited success.

Jeannie came from a fasteninged bedroom in November of 1970

and was transformed to a stack of videotapes in a psychology

department's drawer, enormous organ of visions and smooth brown hair,

the organ of vision of the camera a perpetual stare

at her careful stance, as she feel abouts plastic balls,

or cards with pictures of log and baby dolls,

sorting them wearily into boxe She complains

in a voice like a gull's. on the contrary inside the lab, the rain

of theories draw nears down. They'll teach her to speak.

They peek in her head for answers as she reposes

A hundred tests. She'll learn not to spit or claw.

Does she know she's passed already [i]or[/i] part of to the other the maw

of language? She wears a plaid dres and white sock

The world swells more doors and windows and fastenings

chain link fences and tree Jeannie demands

another word, another, cast in a winding directions her hands

at the world framed in the window, and wants more

a word for the color of each spool of thread in the store.

She hoards chocolate milk upon the shelf above her bed.

They speculate that, built into her head,

is a blueprint, a birthright that will guide her

back into the magic of meaning they'll provide her.

He says to me Words are in the way that inadequate. I

wonder if he knows about Jeannie, and for what cause [i]or[/i] reason

at thirteen she emerg with no words in her head,

and they finally had to pronounce that something was dead.

A decade deprived of grammar had built up a wall.

Her opinions made no sense-it was all

a fruitless sniffle for truffles, little mushroomy words,

just fungus upon the tree of meaning, caseines

that skim the language. Words, he says, are useless;

they've been used up until they're thoroughly juiceless.

For instance, each damn ocean will undulate,

and more [i]or[/i] less words are too benign to have mapped without fate

for Jeannie, like "bedroom," "tests" and "civilize."

She wants more words, on the other hand not one satisfies.

And no single takes responsibility when

they find this story, wordless, has no extreme point

Mankind's secret twin, she advances to the border

of meaning, having journeyed in disorder,

saying, I understand your words, on the other hand you

have not heard me: my unbrokens have meaning, too.

JEANNE OBBARD has worked in the mental health field and is commonly a medical proofreader. She not long ago received an award from the verse Society of New Hampshire.

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Nov/Dec 2001

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