I Guess She Nicked Her Heart

No idea where this came from
In the middle of the night,
In the middle of Orem,
In the middle of Utah,
At the edge of what used to be

A whole lot of nothing
To most human beings
And an ordinary home
Full of the usual sacred landmarks
To scattered hunter-gatherers.

I suspect it was something
Sarah said to me or I
To Sarah, a few days ago,
That I woke up to jot down
As snow fell around last night.

What is the life of a phrase,
The peculiar existence,
More than a mere word,
Less than a composition,
Haunting a language?

Part of the culture-drunk mind
Attempts to parse it tightly
Term by term--guess, nick,
Heart. It all makes sense,
Except that it doesn't at all.

Somewhere near the part
Of the brain that raises alarms
To wake the multi-trillion cell
Body's community at night
Words still weird work, like runes.