The Moment Just Before
*
Speaking is a bodily act before all else–
a vibrating of the voice box
to produce specific sounds–
which means it depends on posture.
In different positions
I let out different noises.
When upside down, for example,
or when my knee gives out
and I slam against a wall,
I don’t say the same things.
I say them differently.
The sound of my voice is different.
*
For me then language
hinges on posture.
*
The first thing to change
depending on the language spoken
is the body’s position in space:
it finds different points of balance
depending on the column
of breath along my spine, and the air
inhaled and exhaled by others
confining the volume of my air.
*
Italian for me begins where
my bronchial tubes flow into the trachea.
In a breath I strain to breathe,
for fear of winding up in mid-phrase,
with no more words or strength
to express what I mean.
*
Japanese is in the shoulders
rolling as if to magnetize the air
and trigger the swirling motion
of glowing particles
closing in on me
until my arms
shoot up from my hips,
forming a funnel of sorts
between neck and thorax,
and finger after finger
discharges a billow of krill.
*
French starts somewhat lower,
near the middle of the ribcage;
and rather than swirl up my sternum
it swells from the sides,
parallel to my extended arms,
passing through my neck
and exiting, at utterance,
as if pumped from the inside
then expelled from the mouth
with the oval motion
of an invisible, elliptical orbit.
*
English is all spine, loin, and nape,
as if a person were standing behind me,
just outside my peripheral vision.
He reminds me of the street mime,
that clown by the Beaubourg museum
who makes you laugh
stalking pedestrians,
and mocking them from behind
as they pass in a hurry,
absorbed in their worries or thoughts.
*
Chinese, German, and Spanish
are no more than words learned poorly
and haphazardly over time,
perpetually forgotten,
all from the throat and the cranium;
an aerial crane
raises them slowly,
diluted as they are in blood and voice,
presses them against the cranial cavity,
and forces them out in bits and pieces,
obstructed and inexpressive,
like the vague but sharply outlined memory,
blurred but insistent,
of a middle-school classmate.
I was never really friends with her and
I learned by chance that she just died,
barely thirty, from a breast tumor,
leaving two young children behind.
*
The first sign of the tidal wave
of approaching hordes.
*
Italian
is the language I speak when I’m lost.
*
I wonder–will anyone ever ask me about this
or will I, the moment just before,
blurt it out nonetheless.
***
Fragile, bent, infernal.
Misery, agony, infinite.
Sweet liquid, so little, congealed.
Conceptions, undone, unwilled.
Measure, she asked for, a fissure.
Love, just an admixture.
***
Heat, oxygen,
displacing, dreaming,
dissolving the thought.
What you had is naught.
***
When the air shivers
the dust in the room
swells with light, polished
by a blade of sunshine.