Six Ways to Hear Goodbye


At first it will be as if no words
exist – as if everything has become
unnamed. It will approach sense only haltingly,
like a half-remembered password,
and you will hear mostly the gravel in it,
grinding under tires on the interstate.

Repeated quickly, another time,
you will hear how some syllables seem
to be describing your own dry throat,
your own dogged thirst to sell your clothes
and that bed and move away –
ahead of all the coal dust and dead canaries.

Swallowing what you can of it,
you will begin to catch undertones of plum
and currant behind the tannin. You might even
begin to suspect that a part of you is holding
the smoke of it deep inside your lungs, feeling it
fidget like goats outside a storehouse

until the whole thing is more – no, let me start over –
until it’s as if you are out people-watching
with Whitman – unseen on the shore
or in the market, as the butcher-boy
puts off his killing-clothes – as your tongue
plays with a mouthful of hyphens.

And then – once again – it will be as if
no words exist.
                                                                                                        for Linh Dinh