Grammar Lesson
Let’s say a comma is a little breath. Not the kind of breath that follows breathlessness, not aerobics class breath, not “Every breath you take I’ll be watching you,” but modest in diameter, roughly the size of three cloud particles. You may or may not be thinking, now, about how you’re breathing all the time, and isn’t that bizarre! how you place commas across paragraphs of sleep, while dreaming and not thinking about oxygen at all. Or maybe you’re thinking about the last drink you had, how you could see yourself in it, in a little paper boat, braving the storm of a spinning straw. To draw a comma is not difficult at all. They are the smallest of crescent moons, with slightly more moon on the upper half. When isolated
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They seem to not mean anything at all. They grow lonesome and curl into themselves. For what is a breath without surroundings? If I pitch a comma and you hit it and you get to second base and it’s still up in the air, spinning like a good memory, you’ll keep running. You’ll run until you get to the home plate, and then you’ll keep running still, collecting and expelling breaths quicker and quicker, until the shadows get so long that they go away, until the paragraph is over.
