Laughter Travels

Laughter Travels

Laughter travels around the hills, up and down
the ridges and through the valleys. It reflects off
granite walls and fills the meadow with sound;
no one can know its source, for wherever you stand, you are
the center of its radius. The laughter, like atmospheric pressure,
clears the clouds and opens the sky to new possibilities.

Laughter packs no baggage, free and improvised. It is the only sound
that babies do best; unspelled and landing upon the ears like
the rainbow on a clear sky. Does their angel tickle their fancy?
Does light find its way within the child’s cheeks? Do circles
amaze her blinking eyes? Do waving trees greet him with
their limbs?

Are we the funny ones with our faces screwed up like
an old clown’s wrinkles? Are we the silliness that ignites
the chuckle, and joining in, we cackle and gurgle more
self-conscious than the tot whose face is flooded with
tears and snot by the end of the spasm that carried us all
into a forest of elves and fairies whose language, I am convinced,
is that same as babies, and exercise quite regularly their
laughter and mirth.

Hilarity lifts the weights with more power than serious convention.

And try as we might, every face in place to recreate the moment
her giggle multiplied itself up out of the windows, across the neighborhood,
past the island that sits in the middle of the river and across the state line
to Oregonian hearers who swore they heard a new bird unsung before.

Try as we might, after conducting each experiment and checking our computations,
we never discovered the word or touch or face or insect or shape or color
or smell or any other. Perhaps, and this is our favorite thesis,

when she laughed, she laughed at nothing at all.