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There's a word you've met but once and now forgotten for the spoon-shaped concave under your Adam's apple: a small pouch that must be kissed and kissed again by lovers learning the ins and outs of one another and where last night in the sleeping dark a lone mosquito inserted itself and drew fresh blood and left venom and a couple of love-bites then left without waking you although this morning you'll blaze with the minute but unassuageable pain of them—which only that word that's vanished into the mud of memory might be the right cooling balm for.

For A.B. She said God. He seems to be there when I call on Him but calling has been difficult too. Painful.

After a Nick Cave “Soundsuit” made from buttons and found vintage abacus When George Washington became president in 1789 he had only one tooth in his head, a single premolar poking up from his gums. His dent- ures were fashioned from lead, gold wire springs, brass screws, the teeth of humans and cows, ele- phant ivory, and hippopotamus bone. It is a myth that he had false teeth made of wood. A mis- perception put forth by those misled by the hair- line fractures that ivory and bone possess. Just as cherry wine will stain cloth with a rust-hued vein, Washington’s fondness for dark wine blemished his teeth. The fractures eventually darkening, un- til resembling the grain in a piece of wood. The darkening of fractures is rather curious. The makeup of the flesh, the constitution of origin, the trackers of bloodlines thrown off the trail. It is difficult to determine what discolor- ations have tunneled their way through the body. Spider veins climbing the back of my legs like a winding river mapping the trauma. An unspoken collective of ephemeral bits and bytes, suffering most eloquently preserved in the mouth. The skin of one’s teeth decides many a fate. A black woman’s incisor settling down inside a white man’s maw. Overall, a quizzical look, an off-color joke about progress, the very blood a trick of the eye, an ocean blue on the outside of the skin, a blushing red if viewed just beneath the sheath. • A tooth is made up of the crown and the root, all the King’s Men destined to revolt. There are many ways to worm your way inside, many open- ings in the body of an animal. Some orifices gated with white entryways. A wooden portcullis, a pick- et fence, a laced corset secured tightly by a maid, a pointed geode just waiting to be pulled, the cavern wall glittering in the dark. Sharp crystals ornament the cave’s jawbone.Cave canem, quite naturally speak- ing. A hooded hole a place for some to hide or go seek. A toothless whistle the signal for the slave hunting bloodhounds, with canines fanged like water moccasins. The swamp mud gushing like the suppertime mush sloshing between the gums of a Confederate soldier. The terror of limbs at odds with the self. In World War I, trench foot meant frequent amputations, the blade sliding like floss between each toe. Some diseases attack the foot or mouth, gums left inflamed in the cross fire. A grieving mother wears dog tags around her neck. Her son’s baby shoes and teeth cast in bronze. The pulp at the center is how the tooth receives nourishment, how it transmits signals to the brain. The forgetting makes the present tense possible. Memory is the gravity of the mind. All the icebergs have started to melt, milky objects left hanging by a string, the doorknobs means to an end. • The keyboard’s toothy smile splayed wide, the flatlined cursor blinks impatiently on the screen, my fingers struggle to tap into word processing. I monitor all of the track changes. Even the computer is a slave to death. Its in- nards already bygone, its body obsolete upon year of purchase. I am a librarian, swimming the digital divide, my predecessor’s paddles — a mass of floppy disks in an office closet. They pile up like the teeth of slaves waiting for sale. An affluent businessman at the door, his hands panning the saliva for white gold. His fingers parting the cavity, pursed lips cooing, I need something of yours to call my own. The desire to chew and smile at will. My grandmother lost her mind before her teeth, lost the memories be- fore the enamel gave way to rot. My face has my mother’s abacus features. We are, in fact, diphyo- dont. In one lifetime we develop two sets of teeth. The missing space filled with air, a hollow exile before the native tongue. I pray my unborn child will have a gap. What the French call “dents du bonheur” or lucky teeth. The womb’s peephole is rather impressionable. I will fasten the buttons of time. I will take the baby’s body in my own, whisper a plea in its discriminating ear: Try to keep your wits about you, my love. Memory is about the future, not the past.

It's often those who talk a streak on world affairs and love and peace who seem to love and peace the least.

One thing you know when you say it: all over the earth people are saying it with you; a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital. What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin: at a street light, a man in a wool cap, yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window; he says,Please. By the time you hear what he’s saying, the light changes, the cab pulls away, and you don’t go back, though you know someone just prayed to you the way you pray. Please: a word so short it could get lost in the air as it floats up to God like the feather it is, knocking and knocking, and finally falling back to earth as rain, as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch, collecting in drains, leaching into the ground, and you walk in that weather every day.

The word comes along out of the mountain every once in awhile to chill me. Undercurrent of an unwillingness to believe all is well in early spring beside a molten river riven by sun, its loud hush and glug through leafless aspens split by a gravel bar’s pulled switch. A bull trout with fluorescent red dorsal fin eddies in a pool between a sloughed-off root clump and caved-in grassy bank. Last year’s downed trees, slash piles, busted garden gate. Heed me and hear my loneliness. Split by a desire to be known by a crowd of solitaires and by one word split. A raven falls out of the yellow flame of a willow. Its wings purely black buff sunlight. It paces the gravel bar, lifts into westerly sun. Wing flash. Black luster. Gone. It is hope that tricks. Belief that when this now shines, this now shines with or without us. Then why scribble the veery’s mid-morning marshal song? Soon Rick will arrive to help burn wood piles: gasoline newspaper cedar shakes to start the blaze in this emptiness searching for godwords. The ones God hears when priests without shoes without socks with their shawls stretched over their heads arms out make forts of light. Their backs to the congregation, their faces toward the ark, they rock. Their white wings so pure that this now is no more than then with its barbells of silence, with its task of burning.

The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased eyes curled outside themes to search the paper now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word entered its continent eager to find another as capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would house them both, they being then two might glide into this house and presently create a rather larger mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious as a newly laid table where related objects might gather to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints, the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might choose and savor before swallowing so much was the sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent percipient as elder branches in the night where words gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.

We are spendthrifts with words, We squander them, Toss them like pennies in the air– Arrogant words, Angry words, Cruel words, Comradely words, Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear. But the slowly wrought words of love and the thunderous words of heartbreak– Those we hoard.

words are birds that arrive with books and spring they love clouds the wind and trees some words are messengers that come from far away from distant lands for them there are no borders only stars moon and sun some words are familiar like canaries others are exotic like the quetzal bird some can stand the cold others migrate with the sun to the south some words die caged— they're difficult to translate and others build nests have chicks warm them feed them teach them how to fly and one day they go away in flocks the letters on this page are the prints they leave by the sea

1 As so-called quarks, so atoms before and through And after molecules, which too Constitute us awhile, pluming Through our slowly changing shapes Like beachscapes Through a duneless sandglass, say (I said, once) — all these So utterly forgetful, wiped clean As numbers with each new use, lint-free. How not so words, which pass our minds And mouths and ears from hind- Most elsewhere, on their way to elsewhere — why So? Words are the sum of their histories: rose And roke and no and blanketing snow. 2 So much less LEGO-like, click- Click together than like slick Tentacular Colonial hydrozoans tossed Together in the copper pots Of   predication — all cross- Shock and shimmery tangle — How can Anyone calculate semantic Sets so dervishly complex? How can we not expect not less but hellish Much more than to mean what we say? Then guess: How can we better but Hope to become in sum what We say when we say again love?