At the Crossing: On Language, Perception, and the Haunting of Truth

---

---

At the Crossing

by Donald S. Yarab

Words
gather like dew on dawn’s edge,
names unspoken, waiting to be born.
They tremble in the mouth of silence—
a stillness before the world.
But say them, and they splinter—
what was whole becomes approximate.
Each syllable divides the light
and leaves behind shadow.

Color
can have no truth—
for truth demands a stillness
color will not grant.
It shifts with light, with eye,
with sorrow or with song.
If it were true, which hue would reign?
Whose gaze would be the measure?
It is not fact, but feeling—
not essence, but event.

Touch
is first knowing,
before word, before sight.
It does not describe—it confirms.
Yet it deceives:
a surface hides a wound,
a hand may linger, then withdraw.
What truth lies in contact—
in pressure, in pulse?
Or is touch merely the place
where self and other collide
and pretend to know?

Sound
resonates not in air alone,
but in the hollows of the soul.
One hears hymn, another wound.
Its truth lies not in frequency,
but in the body that receives it—
in bones that tremble,
in hearts that flinch.
Which is the true tone—
the one that soothes, or the one that sears?

Time
marches allegedly, metronomic, proud—
but to whom does it keep this beat?
To the grieving, it halts mid-breath;
to the joyful, it slips its leash and runs.
Some say it flows;
others drown without a ripple.
Perhaps it does not move at all—
perhaps we shift,
casting shadows on still walls
and calling them hours.

Truth
cannot be summoned by sense,
nor sealed in proposition.
It glimmers, briefly,
when doubt is honored,
when contradiction is not flaw but form.
Truth is not what endures,
but what survives the testing—
a trembling filament between worlds,
not the anchor,
but the thread.

Intersection
is not a place but a moment—
when word is heard,
when color wounds,
when sound divides the silence,
when time dissolves into breath,
and touch recalls the nearness of all things.

And there—
at that trembling margin—
truth does not appear.
It haunts
the space where meaning almost forms.