For many years the tongue was a dragonfly, loosewinged,
hydrophilic above the stream and drenched with its own glossary
of sensation. Sensational tongue, sophisticate, Latinate,
it spoke in the vulgate, as vulgar as Saint Augustine’s
erection in the bathhouse that so shamed him he invented sin
and called it sex, tonguetip turning the scented apple,
addiction to the erotic pomegranate seed, forbidden and lovely as all
that tonguing Augustine banished from Christianity. I guess he was
hydrophobic, hating such carnal sweat and leaving the tongue locked
behind the hedgerow of teeth in the cave of the Inquisition.
And when the wounded tongue emerged it was tentative as
a turtlehead, biting as a snake and pointed as the Taj Mahal, yet still
numinous and mystical as gooseberries, blueberries, blackberries wet
with dew in the Vermont dawn and baskets of them overflowing
and lugged home to make pie in the endless morning of childhood
with my grandmother in the kitchen of the old house on the green mountain
where the deer beds lie flattened and fragrant and hidden in the fields.
Tongue, you almost lost me there, meandering like a country road.
You sentenced me to life, to the lute of love, french horn of loss, sustained me
through the crescendo of “I love you in the morning when the sunlight
flatters the sheets with sheets of light and your breath soothes me back
to sleep and the mind is drenched with dream, I love you despite the loss,
the fear our commune will find its dictator in the long calendar of swooning
and falling we call history, withered grape on the vine turned
to strange wine, yet all those fears give way, sweetbitter, agave-espresso
on the platter in the morning to I love you, I love you, I love you
intentionally, hydrophilically, numinously in the morning with my tongue.”