the word

The Word

Listen: isn’t very word is an attempt,

a way to finger and foot our fear

of the dark even in the wide light

of summer, against the red skin of

our shoulder’s slow burn?  But it’s not

light I want inside or outside

our skin.  It’s word.  It’s an uttering

from the edge of your lips

to my ear, it’s you being that close

and what  you say first.  Listen.

I’ve been wanting that word

since you first uttered it, since you let it

drop down into the well of me,

waiting, not for it to hit the surface,

because surfaces are not bottoms

although we confuse them for that,

the way we confuse peaks of mount-

ains for the very tops of things,

so when we get to them we call

someone we love to tell them

we’re there only they are not

at home.  But somehow over a thousand

miles, still it’s lip to ear, a word

or two is tipped, even though

it’s hours old now and held

in the fist of a pause.  It makes me

remember a story a woman told

how twenty nine years ago she tried

to call the priest while her son was still

alive, barely but he had enough

breath for a few more words

that were a gurgle in his throat but

the priest had shut his phone off, he

had stopped listening, and what were

her son’s last words swirling in swill,

the kind that wash in on the tide of a wreck

and are burst or pulled back in the length

of a breath?  She’ll never say, only she

kissed his bloody mouth the way Eve

would have liked to have done if Able

were lying on her lap with is bloody

head staining her bed.  Words.  Listen,

they are invisible.  They are not

pressed into paper.  They are swollen

tongues and last rights.  They get women

into bed and men into war.  They slip

in or crash in and fall, always fall, like stones

or bullets, from the edge of one pair

of lips to one hollow cave of an ear

and the grip is released, the trigger is pulled

and who, when they fall, finally,

against it all, hears them?