Eleven syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool

The other night I woke up at 2 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. So, I got up for a while. I don’t remember whether I watched T.V. or what. But eventually, I picked up the book my dad had bought for me when Billy Collins did a reading at Miami University about 12 years ago. My dad knew my passion for writing and had asked me to go with him. But I had to work. Dad said he had wanted to get the book signed by Billy for me, but the line was too long. Looking back, that is one of my sweetest memories of my father.

My favorite selection from my Wee Hours poetry reading was this one:

Thesaurus

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions
are always being held,
house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;
hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy
all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile
standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close
to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.
And every group has its odd cousin, the one
who traveled the farthest to be here:
astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.
Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
I rarely open it, because I know there is no
such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous
around people who always assemble with their own kind,
forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.

I had never really thought about it before, but for a writer, his declaration that there is no such thing as a synonym is true. Yet, when I am writing, I do tend to use the thesaurus as a tool- precisely for the fine tuning of meanings. I study the related words as if they are puzzle pieces. I try each one in the sentence until I find the perfect fit for the context. When I write a poem, I’ve been known to keep extrapolating definitions of contextual relatives in the thesaurus until I’m so far down the rabbit hole that I’m only running into those odd cousins and going mad trying to grasp why I wasn’t happy with the first cousin.

Then I started thinking about words where a so-called-synonym would never do. Grace is one of those words. I can’t imagine kindness, decency, or benevolence sounding as amazing as grace.

And I love the last stanza of Billy’s poem. I need to live in that world of wandering words more often when I write. And learn how to lean less on the thesaurus crutch. But I still think it is a very useful tool, gizmo, apparatus, or device.