A Word Please
…a fisherman…could taste
a stream and tell you
what the trout were doing.
from
“Up and Out”
Marge
Percy
If words are made flesh, isn’t the tongue the most sweet
and most
bitter of organs? Doesn’t it walk
on its
very own through the air when the mouth’s
open,
curling like toes in hot sand or against
the
cold departure of blood when the boots go bad?
Isn’t the tongue made bold with breast milk, warm as
her
placenta, amniotic sweet? Isn’t that why
we know
the
taste of seas?
Tongue, tell me, what were your first words? Aren’t they
burned
in there somewhere? If I peeled
the skin
back, would the scar of sound rise up
into
the air like lit incense, an Enoch, and then be
no
more? Weren’t those first words like God’s,
tight fists of need, but before that, the claws of an osprey
wide
open over the water, over the slim solid fish
bubbling
up for the bug? Don’t they, words, gurgle
out
around the drowning trout, on their way
toward the pine, her bloody gill a bellows we’d know
the
aroma of right away if we were brave
enough
to bend, to inhale, then, tongue tipped
and
tight, lick up toward the eye, the pearled
gloss
beginning, the last breath of the rainbow
going down our throat?
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