Fog of Tongues
Once upon a time
words were beasts.
They stalked the things they named
until they became those things.
Fog
stumbled behind.
We lived and died in the direction of words—
a religion of everything unsaid.
Not an image named.
Only sun and shadow—
that violent blur
between
moon waxing gibbous moon waning crescent.
Growing up I flung myself
toward the words
that fell slurring from my father’s mouth—
fished them
from the darkest slits
of our secondhand couch like lost coins.
I flung myself
toward and around and onto and inside.
His words were beasts—
claws and teeth dripping fur
scared and shaking so desperate
to cling to some freedom of expression
suitable to name his misery an ancestral strain
mapped out in his blood.
Something like God or something like
the thing without the word
for the thing.
Maybe a single moment that had never been
lit at the edges by his past—curled up by that violence
of words
is what he craved—
is what he tried to carve out of me.
Not the familiar strangeness of memory. Not
the mud it’s made from. Not a mother murdered
or a deranged uncle to blame.
Not always his absent father. Not so often in jail.
Not
the streaked glass where the brick propped open
the window
before it attempted to name
all things.
One brick
the moment of its fall a mist
over everything after
that can ever be said—red brume—the blood
the uncle toed into the carpet like a bored boy
before he said the words
your mother is going to be fine.
Before he hauled her dying where pines hem the river
always midsentence
just off highway 107.
If my father could wage such a war with words—
if he could stalk them circle them move toward
and around and onto and inside—
if he could lose
I can whisper whatever prayer
this is.
I can reshape words like a beast sighing.
Name nothing
a bloodstained brick
falling from dead hands.
I can leap
toward and around and onto and inside.
Christopher Shipman’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Fence, Poetry, and elsewhere. His experimental play Metaphysique D’ Ephemera has been staged at four universities. Getting Away with Everything (Unlikely Books, 2021), co-authored with Vincent Cellucci, is his most recent collection. He lives in Greensboro, NC, where he teaches literature and creative writing at New Garden Friends School and plays drums in The Goodbye Horses.
