utter/un/utter

 

utter/un/utter

 

Names are limbs aren’t they third limbs they carry us

like parents carry us they balance and ballast us they moor

us and sometimes unmoor us their meaning to people

who gave them to us they are climbing ivy they rise

or maybe they are rooted from the grime their weight is

gravity on the ground pressing into the living skin a way

of passing a way of tossing the baton down the line

from some other time its one way of making the living

carry the dead their names at every spoken evocation listen

the angel spoke to mary so we call what we name how

we call how we name how we stand or handle how it is

grafted into us our skin and it is scarless at birth it is and it

sticks and thickens and it persists in the dark it is a chanting

a spell of protection a prayer against a curse a prayer for

it is when it is suddenly cut off without provocation or

maybe with provocation the force it must take to make it

a clean wound to make it say an amputation and it’s all

about saving the rest of the body to cauterize to clot

to stitch to cause to wash to tend to flair the fever to sicken

to weaken to finally get well and what tell me of the stricken

limb what of it now it is on the cutting floor and what of

the tongue and how it must now go like an undressed wound

that name now unuttered the song of it and what it was now utterly

unsung but the tongue! wraps look wraps the phantom in

its nacre and like the stillborn carefully cradled and empty

of breath the wound of its silence drying and the brave

the unpracticed brave tend the open scar that it is please

tell me where do all the whispered once was’s go? softly off?

how do they make it out of the body all the bodies that breathed

it and to what years are they these now shunned lepers drifting into?