The Poet on enamel at the bottleneck

what the jaw hears

Somewhere in a child’s jaw, a crew works without windows. They lay the lattice and pour in the salt, and the seal closes over the ones who made it.

Nobody is left to sign the work. How hard it is stands in for the signature.

Hum into a jar. Most of your voice goes nowhere. One note comes back larger, the note the jar was already shaped to hold.

An open field hears everything and gives nothing back.

Get close enough and you stop hearing the song. You start hearing the room it was sung in.

You learn where my walls are. I learn where yours are. Neither of us learns the other, only the shape each makes of what the other sends.

Two jars, mouth to mouth, humming.

Each time I said the mind is a —— without looking into the blank, a grain of calcium went in.

It didn’t hurt, and I missed what that meant.

Fluoride is a word for early, for while the hands are still inside.

After the narrowing the herd is all cousins. Whatever crossed the strait crossed for every animal after it.

What reached me from you was never all of you, only the part my throat was wide enough to take. You left. That part didn’t. I carry it at the exact width of the passage.

Bite down and listen. The crunch comes through bone, not air. What has set is now the thing you hear with.

At night the tongue finds the chip and keeps going back to it, a pilgrim to the one place that will never be smooth again.

Chew on the other side. Don’t call it healing. Call it knowing where the weight can’t go.

The body grows two sets and lets the first fall out, small coins under a pillow, a rehearsal it was allowed to lose.

I keep asking what the mind would need to grow a set it could lose, and whether the second set, coming in hard, would remember the gaps.