Suck on the Marrow

You are not the one Melinda sings her underbreath song to please

18 You are not the one Melinda sings her underbreath song to please i. You, Joseph Freeman, who once would sing words the sermon could not say, the whole church waiting, Sundays, for the Freeman song, and especially waiting for the bass cry (such remembrance in your young body?) that was Joseph Freeman singing in Meeting. You, Joseph, are not the one who will sit in the men’s pew singing, as you sang Sundays, surrounded by your brother, your father, your uncle (Melinda, your oldest friends, the whole church, maybe even the Good Lord listening). No, Joseph, you are not the one whose back heat and resting weight that pew’s wood will curve and cup itself to welcome. You are no more the one that pew’s arch would recognize today than you are the man who will hear, tonight, what new song Melinda, in the rocking chair, (no more your rocking chair than her rooms are, any more, your rooms) will catch under her breath and sing. 19 ii. When you were Joseph, when you had two rooms you could give your wife your hands and ears and mouth inside, you listened. You let your wife keep you awake trilling over what she’d cleaned that afternoon. A cameo— her lips, a closed purse when she pronounced the m, opened for you on the e, wider on the o—strung on velvet. You wrapped a band around her neck, kisses, ending where the cameo would fall, at the hollow, that perfect frame. When you had two rooms and no one but your wife inside them, you could listen all night to the things she desired. Silk stockings, for instance. What, you asked, was wrong with the stockings she wore? These wool ones? You touched the leg she lifted toward you. I would be just as happy not to wear them a minute more. And didn’t you listen to her? Didn’t you lend your hand and help Melinda peel those old stockings away? 20 iii. Now you are a mouth tasting dust and salt and finger flesh. You are all your remaining teeth arranged to satisfaction, gums just pink enough to please. You are a saleable mouth and your tongue does nothing. It does not curl into a consonant, it does not shape the vowels that would add up to a plea because you are not Joseph Freeman, night guard of Melinda. The ones who wait on your voice are not the ones whose listening would make a morning right. Before you were nothing but an auctioned mouth and a pair of hands that only mind commands, they made you little more than a brine-sealed back and cross-hatched thighs. Your tongue twisted in quick tempos as you learned each new instrument’s name: cat-o-nine tails, pudding stick, ordinary oar. You’d rather keep silent than call up more cognates. You, Joseph Freeman, who once would sing words. ...