And the first poem in Palladium, also, is partly about language.
So I'll segue into this one.
I think I wrote this when I had a realization that some things
can't be fixed.
And for a long time, I think I thought, with language,
everything could be made right.
That if you told a lie, it could be--
I'd never-- maybe I didn't think that about lying,
but I thought that you could explain yourself.
And then I realized at a point when
I think it was maturity, that some things can't
be fixed at all, and that's part of the subject of the poem.
It's called Babies, with all the various meanings of lovers
as babies and babies as babies.
Babies, born gorgeous with nerves.
With brains the pink of silver polish,
or jellyfish wafting ornately through the body below.
An invertebrate cooing on the mother tongue
shushes and lulls them into thinking all is well.
As they grow, they learn salvage, tear out guides
to happiness, say apologies, can outshine lies,
guilt be lick-spittled from their lives,
bad glycerined to good.
Like a child's first school pencils
in their formal brilliance and sharp new smells,
they lie as lovers.
Maybe one cries the wrong name, and the night,
skinning them pleasantly alive, leaps away in shards.
Then it's time for restitution.
A tin of home-baked, holding gingham safety,
fetal as the light through mason jars of beets and brine.
Or jewelry clasping and unclasping,
aisles of fluorescents from great department stores.
A distracting plenitude, and tempting.
Still, the beloved may stay bitter as an ear,
the tongue pressed into, unwanted.
And the word end, spiny, finally formed, indents them
and is understood.
They learned the hard way as hurts accrue and the brain
is cratered as a rock by rain that fell
ages passed on unprotected mud.
An insult keeps, despite apologies.
And when it vaporizes at last, its space fills with grains
that harden to a fossil shaped exactly like the insult.
They grow up when they know that, sometimes, only a gesture
responsive as a heart-shaped parachute above a jump a life
depends on to be perfect the first time will ever do.