What We Did About a World That Kept Getting Very Loud
We quit listening. All the listening was done. Listening, as an activity, had only occurred in the past tense.
We had mouths now. Vehicular mouths.
An ocean was being built from new mouths. Human mouths carved off their cadavers’ faces.
Children’s mouths. An orangutan’s mouth puckering up at the camera.
That’s how orangutans say I love you.
There was a God of Mouths who appeared as we were starting construction.
He offered us a sack of mouths, but none of them were His own.
What an ocean! Mouths on mouths.
Mouths engorged by the various rain storms that wander over the ocean.
Though the rain made clear, it wanted nothing to do with mouths.
But everyone knows rain is a part of nature. And nature, by its very nature, is related to thirst.
Some mouths preferred not to speak.
One well-placed smirk could be known to launch a thousand ships.
We blew up a giant balloon, and we held it in one place.
It felt like an ocean trying to keep it there.
But it was only a balloon hovering over a stadium.
Not the blimp kind. But a new invention designed to look much warmer after we wrapped it in
cashmere.
We painted a mouth on the side of it. It looked like it was breathing.
No one had planned for how long it would take mouths to accumulate into an ocean.
When would there ever be enough mouths?
We were hoping there would be time for our children’s children to have the pleasure of vacationing at a
well-known beach.
Children are very loud at the beach.
They play with anything. It doesn’t matter what it looks like.
It could be a mouth that reminds them of their grandmother.
Gorged with rainwater.
And swollen with bruises, because the other mouths had been kissing it over miles and miles of gentle
ocean-rolling action.
I saw my grandmother’s mouth the day after she died, and it was a very quiet mouth, a delicate mouth.
I wouldn’t want to be looking at it while I was at the beach on vacation.
How much of my life did I live by virtue of my grandmother’s mouth saying so much?
Now she is dead.
There should be nothing at all interesting about the familiarity of a mouth.
Kent Shaw’s book Calenture was published by University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.