The child with too many mothers lived among
his many selves like a fox among chickens,
sleeping through all those little lives, waking only
to pain or passion that made a noise. A music.
Anaximines is said to have said, all things are air—
rarest it is fire, thicker it is wind, more thick, cloud;
further condensed, air is water, falling from cloud,
falling into fire then windily rising as steam—
but in its most arduous state of intensity, air is earth,
air is stone, and who could deny such a solid-state
physics. And yet the soul, he said, is air, and soul
holds us, frail humans, together—the persistent breath
is me, in and out is self, on cold days visible, on hot,
I feel my touch. But rarest of all airs is music. A
voice a victory
and voice mumbles into the microphone
every chance it gets—it lies, will defraud incessantly
given half a chance. Elements of uttering include
false making, material alteration, legal efficacy
and intent, passing or making use; all this lying
caresses the lips and tongue, muttering tenderness.
Consider, for instance, the word suture. Utter it.
The wind cannot be repaired, it can be torn, it can tear.
*
These are several sounds at the serenade.
Cough, a mortal engagement, sympathetic vibration
around the deathbed: relatives gather solemn
as Bach on the organ, as the Art of the Fugue,
as a sigh, echo, a consolation to the living:
perjury is a pleasure; listen, word against word,
given, taken back. The echoing silence is not silent
there tearing itself against the self the wick the flame
furious with itself the heated particles pulling against
the charring wick. Perjury is false swearing, it is
the voice vacillating, it is the necessary music of
despair and reconciliation. Call and response.
Take my word for it.
Uttering
a forged instrument is the passing or making use of a forged writing
or document with knowledge of its forged nature.
A name is a prediction. See the expectant
parent consulting the lists, studying meanings
to declare to a world, to give up her child as…
I predict a you, o my child. A childlike spectacle
announced to being then utters itself as if
as if as if… I predict “you” will still be “you” next time
I say this name. I pronounce you into being, or out.
Speak softly, say little. Here are some names: Albert
DeSalvo, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey
Dahmer, Wayne Williams, Richard Ramirez.
Failing which, simply
failing, a small man such as Any would tender
a bounded ambition (to breathe, cough, sneeze, speak,
declaim, defame, denounce, announce, call, respond,
reply or merely in a small space out of the wind to
blow breath warmly into my own wintry hand) and
hand it over reservedly, to consume a self enraged,
in rags, or emptied, like pity.
Ite, missa est, the priest muttered,
and out we went with an organ intoning around us,
we were called a congregation who listened to
some hand at the keyboard, the machine a lung
wheezing—a building as if burning, embers floating—
and hope continued that we would be delivered
from the hand that hates us.
--Bin Ramke, 2004