I was born an unhung tongue,
linteled in a house without foundation,
door hinged only to itself. I was born between two
languages, for what frenulum could root my radicles, 
form fibrils into universal words? I was chimera, a hybrid mouth
confused, attempting to touch tongues I couldn’t speak or understand: 
Cajun French, Yiddish.  I sampled textured syllables like filiforms of braille 
but still found no communion, no way to translate transubstantiation, bread and wine 
at lifted bell rung into flesh and blood, or understand the tales of covered mirrors, 
whispers, when my parents wed. I could only write the silence, watch again 
my father’s face, when at his mother’s shiva, relations came to bend 
and bless his sister’s head, murmur prayers for her in Hebrew, 
but turned away from him as if he were a shudder in the air, 
their faces locked, their tongues 
gone hard and mute 
as stone.
                        

	On learning that my damaged feet require surgery

They never stopped ticking, my overstepped
osteophytes, those arch nemeses, tricked out
in crenelated ridges: interior gears, springs 
and ossified projections. You could take the clock 

of walking me apart and magnify it 
with two screwed-on extra eyes. You could probe 
its delicate anatomy: how everything takes time 
to come full circle, how we parse the pulse in riddles. 

Escape wheel. Minute hand.  Once, on strings, 
my finger bones could make the minutes fly, arpeggiating 
phrases rosined into lassos or parabolas, a staff of undulating lines. 
They stiffened, and, too soon, my swollen wrist-gears ground

the movement down until I moved my music
into feet, reverberating earth between two soles: 
space to tremor blood-beat, my bones, time’s own signature. 
I thought I’d found a way to re-skein air with music,

a place to take dictation from a pendulated heart 
that has lost track of time. Bullshit. Time tracked me 
all along: that metronomic hunter. The doctor sees
my calcified phalanges sheathed inside their own survival

and now a spur of moment shards my every step.  
I learn the word cheilectomy, wishing my own will 
could sand my bones until they smoothed into 
an hourglass turned sideways- two helices laid prone, 

for how can time keep ticking when its gravity is gone?
If I could only lose my North and South, become a clock
unmagnetized, find rest where feet forget their burls, 
but I am trapped in entropy. My feet scribe medial cuneiform, 

sift hours into bone.
                        

Back home all week, I dreamed in needles, stitches, until in morning 
I mined salt-grit from my eyes, sharding into skin. It is only after I
am once more far away that I can wrap time’s patchwork 
heart-thrum close around the night as if a katydid or frog 
whose time is short. Not just repeat. Entreaty. 

child, mother, father, home? half. have half. 
have hum. hum father. hum, home, here. hear. here. 

All week, puckered seams perturbed my sleep. I worried them 
to bunch and gather, pleating night with past. Such threads of selves, 
their remnants, a litany through skin sunk in subdermally, 
vibrating every organ, bone. Father woven into chant. 
Take the filament, repeat. Passacaglia. Bass ostinato. Threnody.

child, mother, father, home? half. have half. 
have hum. hum father. hum, home, here. hear. here. 

All week, I tangled into bittersweet; those scraps preserved 
in photographs, my son’s features framed with Mama’s hair, 
and also, there, my father’s eyes, the same gaze threading through 
time’s faces, rippling its surface. His voice still asking us 
to leave a message on the answering machine.

child, mother, father, home? half. have half. 
have hum. hum father. hum, home, here. hear. here.

My flight back home delayed, relayed to family
3000 miles away and finally, I land again in swamp dark, 
the air thick-throated hum of litany, quilt pulsating 
with katydid and cricket calls, the urgency of frogs
I hear but cannot see.

child, mother, father, home? half to have 
have hum. hum father. hum now home, here. hear. here.