The Lexicon of Lasting Tides
Before the ink, the silence was a throat
too wide for breath, a hollow-hoarding room
where syntax slept in dust, a formless mote.
Then came the stroke—the necessary doom—
that etched the first shaky consonant of home.
We named the light, and naming made it fear,
a brilliant terror cracking in the air:
And in that sound, the echo was a tear.
The lexicon is porous. It accepts
the slow encroachment of the sudden “gone.”
I’ve seen the tense shift while the subject slept,
the “is” dissolved before the “is” was done.
I hear your laughter, a broken, brittle run,
a syntax in the doorway of the mind
that leaves the quiet, comfortable behind,
a shape I cannot hold, but seek to find.
I have attempted to define your hand—
its knuckles, a syntax of necessary stone—
but language is a shifting, sliding sand,
it takes the shape of all that I have known
and breaks it down, a solitary moan.
I know the definition of the wait:
a vowel stretched until it cracks with weight,
a verb that acts too often and too late.
If I could pull the vowels from the air
and rearrange the grammar of our loss,
I’d make a structure sturdy, stable, fair,
a monument that does not pay the cost
of every single, sudden, final frost.
But every word is stolen from a sigh,
a breath that knows it only needs to die,
a sky that mimics emptiness to fly.
The inevitability is, in turn,
a pivot where the poem starts to break.
I feel the syntax of the darkness burn,
the structure of the longing that I take,
the shape of every mistake that I make.
I find myself within the space
between the first and final, fast embrace,
a memory I cannot quite retrace.
So let the lexicon be what it is:
a porous thing that lets the silence in.
I trace the syntax of the final kiss,
and find the ending in the way I spin
a language from the skin, and from the sin.
The tide returns, the lexicon is wet—
The words are drowning in the sharp regret—
And I am learning, slowly, to forget.
Forget the sound, the shape, the solid hand,
and keep the empty, loud, and lovely air.
I understand the way the broken sand
creates a new topography to share,
a syntax in the middle of despair.
The ocean does not need a name to be.
It is the final, endless, opening plea,
a memory that only lives in me.
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