Love Letter to Language: An Abecedarian
By Saramanda Swigart
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Agate autumn evening in bed, inside me verbs unfurl, fernlike fractals
Becoming new branches, leaf-words strewn or gathered, brindle, a typesetter’s
Case overturned, lead letters littering the ground to collect, coalesce into rich-man
Dreams, sumptuous as cinnamon, textured as dimpled damask, soft-rumbling as an
Engine; English lets me step into her like a bath, a new skin, my mama’s voice
Forming the florid hazel forest of Yeats’ Aengus, who pursues inspiration, a
Girl with apple-blossom hair, chased through lands dappled, golden, hilly,
Hollow, but he never has her, the pursuit itself a heady headlong hagiography.
I love my language as a lover loves, how it—sultry, soft, delicious, dazzling,
Jocund, joyous, morose, milky, bursting with birdsong, moist in the mouth--
Kabooms and careens and moans and murmurs and morphs to fit any mood
Languorous at times—at times bombastic, a marching band—or bare as bread
Metastasizing on the muscle of its own inner intricate yeasts, massing up into the
Numinous night air, a nacreous cloud cover above the city that hums with the
Opals and pearls that are (now) verses falling into a lover’s ear, the delicate Byzantine
Pulchritude of her shell-like organ, word-potpourri behind a gauzy curtain, how
Quixotic that I yearn to—not hear exactly—but feel those words enter her, those
Rotund letters, Bs like breasts, like all a woman’s protuberances, patter of Ps up the
Spine, sensuous, sibilant, a snake charmer’s syllables, drawn up to the mouth by the
Trembling, reedy plaint of speech; in another home, words a trap of tar, a child’s terror,
Uncanny dreams hanging upside down in his curtains, flap and fluster over his
Voice, small in the bed, praying, surrounded by plush, insufficient protection, night a
Watershed from which he will never return the same; for peer into any body,
X-ray for taxonomy of bone—tibia, tarsal, fibula, phalanges, cranium, carpals, ischium;
You see they are made of words, erected into forms, then feelings, then figments, the eternal,
Zealous reshaping of chaos into patterns that we lose control of the moment they are born.
Becoming new branches, leaf-words strewn or gathered, brindle, a typesetter’s
Case overturned, lead letters littering the ground to collect, coalesce into rich-man
Dreams, sumptuous as cinnamon, textured as dimpled damask, soft-rumbling as an
Engine; English lets me step into her like a bath, a new skin, my mama’s voice
Forming the florid hazel forest of Yeats’ Aengus, who pursues inspiration, a
Girl with apple-blossom hair, chased through lands dappled, golden, hilly,
Hollow, but he never has her, the pursuit itself a heady headlong hagiography.
I love my language as a lover loves, how it—sultry, soft, delicious, dazzling,
Jocund, joyous, morose, milky, bursting with birdsong, moist in the mouth--
Kabooms and careens and moans and murmurs and morphs to fit any mood
Languorous at times—at times bombastic, a marching band—or bare as bread
Metastasizing on the muscle of its own inner intricate yeasts, massing up into the
Numinous night air, a nacreous cloud cover above the city that hums with the
Opals and pearls that are (now) verses falling into a lover’s ear, the delicate Byzantine
Pulchritude of her shell-like organ, word-potpourri behind a gauzy curtain, how
Quixotic that I yearn to—not hear exactly—but feel those words enter her, those
Rotund letters, Bs like breasts, like all a woman’s protuberances, patter of Ps up the
Spine, sensuous, sibilant, a snake charmer’s syllables, drawn up to the mouth by the
Trembling, reedy plaint of speech; in another home, words a trap of tar, a child’s terror,
Uncanny dreams hanging upside down in his curtains, flap and fluster over his
Voice, small in the bed, praying, surrounded by plush, insufficient protection, night a
Watershed from which he will never return the same; for peer into any body,
X-ray for taxonomy of bone—tibia, tarsal, fibula, phalanges, cranium, carpals, ischium;
You see they are made of words, erected into forms, then feelings, then figments, the eternal,
Zealous reshaping of chaos into patterns that we lose control of the moment they are born.
Saramanda Swigart has a BA in postcolonial literature and an MFA in writing and literary translation from Columbia University. Her short work, essays, and poetry have appeared in Oxford Magazine, Superstition Review, The Alembic, Fogged Clarity, Ghost Town, The Saranac Review, and Euphony to name a few. She has been teaching literature, creative writing, and argumentative writing and critical thinking at City College of San Francisco since 2014.