Not This Mouth
Bigger & bigger, everything is so daddy today it cuts
No no no no, he repeats, doing it
anyway, pulling at the peril-colored outlet strip:
bear baby bread bad
“If there’s a name for it, it isn’t what he wants”
—which means bird but also (because
he’s pointing)
the withered trill of leaf
clicking shipwrecked in the fingers of a junk tree
thing-shaped names warmly swarm
and not the lumpen worldstuff
rising up to chew his untamed mouth
little Achilles, little engine that won’t.
Bird is no poem, but no bird is
it’s mere that makes dear reader
spit out its poem about pig-iron and ergo
the argot of desire rips out
the dictionary pages, ugly that
the wounds vowel together: no no nono
don’t plug that body in there
don’t, gulp, unplug that mommy from the other, softer mommy
a bird in the bread & a baby in the hole
in the head
a shine of home
buries sizzle in the smallest sign of wall
How much is us? Why shall we not
in such burning place live out our allotments?
nothing looks good on paper
if you can tame it, you can have it
No no no no, he repeats, doing it
anyway, pulling at the peril-colored outlet strip:
bear baby bread bad
“If there’s a name for it, it isn’t what he wants”
—which means bird but also (because
he’s pointing)
the withered trill of leaf
clicking shipwrecked in the fingers of a junk tree
thing-shaped names warmly swarm
and not the lumpen worldstuff
rising up to chew his untamed mouth
little Achilles, little engine that won’t.
Bird is no poem, but no bird is
it’s mere that makes dear reader
spit out its poem about pig-iron and ergo
the argot of desire rips out
the dictionary pages, ugly that
the wounds vowel together: no no nono
don’t plug that body in there
don’t, gulp, unplug that mommy from the other, softer mommy
a bird in the bread & a baby in the hole
in the head
a shine of home
buries sizzle in the smallest sign of wall
How much is us? Why shall we not
in such burning place live out our allotments?
nothing looks good on paper
if you can tame it, you can have it
* * *
Jasper Bernes is the author of Starsdown (ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni, 2007). No Tell Motel first published this poem in 2005. Jasper wrote, "'Not This Mouth' developed from an assignment my friend David Weiss gave to the both of us. We occasionally do this during the triage phase of the semester, as it tends to foreshorten the anxious thumb-twiddling stage of composition (at least for me). He e-mailed two quotes, the first from Randall Jarrell’s “A Sick Child”: “If I can think of it, it isn’t what I want.” The second was from D.W. Winnicott, who writes: “Animals can be tamed, but not mouths.” Both quotes seemed to speak directly to my experience of watching my son, Noah, enter into language, and with it enter into a contract with the world that was gradually separating itself from him. Noah would point at an object—a stuffed animal or ball—and utter its name, and then upon receiving it, express immediate dissatisfaction. As in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the object was a metonym, a vitiated substitution for what he really wanted, which could neither be named nor directly apprehended. I could relate."
