I

You cannot say it without meaning

something particular and peculiar.

It’s a lonely syllable, forgotten

in a child’s mouth, out of tune

with the cavernous song of you.

It overshadows. It is

a tree among stumps—

its top branches,

its sturdy roots,

stretching outwards,

away from itself.

It dresses in an emperor’s clothes,

likes to be  dominant and predominant 

upon the tongues of everyone. 

More a vow than a vowel,

it’s an open-mouthed sounding.

Some chant it, as if repetition

will bring it into being. But it’s nothing

without you to give it something

to speak of.  

Perhaps that’s why it’s constantly striving

to fill up the scrawny scratching, its hunger

for the one thing it will never become—you.

Perhaps that’s why it chalks

straight lines until they become

bars, barricading a view of an unfettered

expanse, its longing to be something other

than a crisis or contradiction.

And perhaps that’s why it envies

those unplowed fields growing

a horizon, the wide, taunting sky,

the unselfconscious sun illuminating

all of it.

© Ami Mattison