On Naming

 

On Naming

 

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground,

Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

 

                                    Seamus Heaney

                                    Glanmore Sonnets, II

 

Is it true we name things out

of our longing for

them the breath of their

enunciation in our ear

when we lift the syllables

from our tongue to our lips?

Do we wet those lips before

we speak

or after?  Is it a dish

we’ve come to savor but all

aroma no flesh or fat or broth?

 

There’s salt on

the air.  The brining kind.  The kind

splayed and blonding cod strung

from the clothes line with bailing

twine grasps into her

flaky pores and all of her open

meat hardens in the dismissive heat.

At night sometimes

there’s a smell of it

that salt of cod or pollock

when the sheet cuff

was briefly tucked up to

the splayed underbelly & it’s just

enough of a rub to get sucked in

to the cotton. A whiff.  A simple

whiff.  Enough

 

to make a small pool

of mucous and enough to make you

lick your lips or want to and start

to call