1
I asked you about the mouth—
you said, a fish has one if the fish has lips,
worm too.
A mouth’s anatomy is
cell-less
lips have cells: the boundary
they circumscribe;
cheeks have cells, limit
mouth extent even in cod, so sweet.
What volume of water or air,
ingress, egress,
can be said there?
Buttered cod cheeks
filled, in transit,
the space my mouth makes.
2
Prepositions applying to the mouth:
in.
The glass is on your lips,
coffee in your mouth
beer froth on your moustache,
barley, hops,
ale in your mouth
water in your mouth.
You said, a mouth can be
on a mouth, in a deep
tongue-swaddling kiss.
I said, sweetheart, the lips and tongue
are on each other,
all over each other
but the mouth—well, my tongue’s in yours
and yours in mine,
exchanging breath,
time for nothing
but expletives.
3
You beg baby, do not to put
that
in your mouth, baby,
and reach to grasp
insect, dirt, worm
afraid to let mouth
take its daily milligram dose
of the three-kilo muck allotment
prior to earth-rest.
If baby were asleep,
its as-if-underwater
vellus-haired head
facing heaven
in a crib of soft wool under
swaying dinosaur mobiles,
how less concerned would you be
with the moth above baby’s mouth,
light-bound (turn it off),
the bat flying over baby’s mouth
failing to find its echo
in baby’s box-walled room?
4
I said, the mouth proves
all sacred spaces
empty, yet-to-be-filled
conduits for sacred as-yet-to-bes.
You said, every word of any use
passed through a mouth
to listening or overhearing ears,
transited the mouth for the time
it takes to say
this—all words
even
methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl…isoleucine
those ellipsis three
hours of protean parts—
forgive me, protein parts.
Now, titin, the word for those hours—a word
even a chemist can live with—a
short shorthand, tenth-of-a-second
handle for that titanic alchemical unkenning,
I asked, is that three-hour word sacred?
You instructed me, Yes:
someone took the time to say it,
Ent-chemical word.
5
I said, I refuse to believe in something
that can’t be said.
You said, all of it
will be worth saying when
a fortunate insight
sloshes through the mind of some
body that has the exhibitionist
leaning to open
the lips, breathe, and
say whatever that word will be
through the sluice of the mouth.
I said, we should all
open the mouth, throw back the head
and let the uvular clapper
ring—
no sighs, no
harrumphs, no groans—
conduct your body’s living choir
from the lung organ bellows.
6
There are
deplorable mouths that ache:
tongues, cheeks that suck,
teeth through which
soap on lubricated membranes
slides.
Incidental metal replacements,
identifying remarks,
filling the cavities in the cavity of the mouth
with echoes of
extreme, execrable
depravities of speech.
I said, I mouthed off every day
when I was less than twenty,
punched in the mouth for it,
punched with a ring in the cheek below the eye
in the face, dented.
7
It was, for me, a synecdoche:
my father would say, Hey,
mouth!
when I’d mouth off.
I never told him to fuck
off to his face.
Under the breath nothing; the said thing
must be clear, audible.
You said,
if mouth is a synecdoche for you,
in a way, your mouth has
no limit—the body containing it
a torus—a ring in the nose
of the bull in the social
register of gifts
snorting its last breath, so easily
shattered
without remorse.
8
In through the mouth door,
through esophagus rex,
pausing in gut
for breath,
out through the rest you know—
we climb
the chain of the body’s
words, the waste
of all unsaid things, created,
consecrated, un-
made, execrable.
But I’d rather speak of what you want to hear.
I desire not a biological but
a verbal intimacy.
Guided by the mouth
a breath can move
a hand, touch
and lubricate
a body stalled by
so much waste
of breath
Stephen Brockwell mucks about in Ottawa wearing masks his partner Gwendolyn
Guth has constructed from Japanese fabric and MERV 11 filter paper. He is a
member of the Tree Reading Series board of directors and helped launch its
virtual post-covid-19 era. His seventh book of poems was intubated at dawn in leafless
spring.