Digression

Allow me, if you will,
a moment of digression—

on digression, of all things, as I
would like to take at least one moment
to defend my own propensity—admittedly
extensive, my tendency toward Latinate
structures with
a half-dozen clauses dangling
subordinate to my point, but really,
one point is never actually enough—as I

was saying, defending that
thrill I get (because I do, really, I do) from
drawing out the entrails of a sentence
line after line, dash after dash,
comma after comma,
semicolon after colon after
semicolon in true
eighteenth-century fashion, since there is always

more to say, always that necesity
of interjection (in the absence of footnotes) to indicate
the complexity of the matter, to note
a historical context, or to suggest
another potentially brilliant
but discardable path (since if it were
truly brilliant, it would deserve
its very own sentence, its own sequence
of asides), which, to be

entirely honest, is
what I thought I’d met that day
when I heard as I walked
to my Latin midterm
your voice asking me
on a date: I thought,

ah, an aside to the sentence of my
semester (or perhaps a mere
minor digression from the aside which
that particular week
was certainly doomed to be); of course

then you went
and became a full-fledged sentence all your own, and then
a paragraph, a chapter
heading toward a tome that with each passing page
delightedly relegated Latin and exams to a state
beyond digression—they (them, theirs, and every antecedent
to every pronoun not “you” or “I” or “we”) became mere

endnotes, marked with a smallish symbol
only vaguely attached to the “s”
in “us”


—because I feel one coming on. 


 (Charisse Stephens in My Best Friend: The Long-Distance Courtship of Cory and Charisse Stephens or, An Autobiography of Us, pg 145-146.)