Word

by Jude Nutter

As if language could become solid.

My mother’s sentences become shorter
as her needs grow smaller. And then
shorter still. Stone bridge with a diminishing

span. Become phrases. Become single
words chosen from the rubble inside
her mouth: Bird! Outside! Water.
Please. Tired. Tired. She has grown tired

of language. On her night stand
a tumbler of water on a plastic coaster and the last
book she ever opened in which,
for a year now, a green leather bookmark

has been holding its tongue; in which snowdrifts
on the train lines from Istanbul
have stranded Poirot just beyond Vinkovci
with twelve suspects and clues
appearing one by one—the handkerchief,
the button, the crimson kimono.

To abandon language is to stop
creating a place other than your own life
in which to live. It is to enter
the terrible certainty of the flesh. Even god
is only possible through language
but, still, I declare that it is possible
to transform a body into a temple: look

how our own lungs, unfolded
and smoothed and pressed out flat,
are the size of a spinnaker, could have a sailboat
flying before a strong wind; how they have

the dimensions of a good-sized room, a room
in which my mother might sit,
for a while, before the open window, and so enter
the heft and stance of the outside world.

I have grown used to the seethe
and abrasion of her breathing, truly. Truly.
And this is how I want to leave her, then,
my mother: in a room by an open window, turning

toward the steady compress of light
on the surface of the bay, to a skylark’s rising

smear of music, and to the sleek, white pony
in the wet, roped-off pasture next door
navigating, head down, through the high

surge of wild iris to small islands
of fresh grass; as a woman
who spent the last months of her life with nothing
but rain inside her.