Vocabularies

See how the wing rises slightly, masking the bright
burning horizon? And notice that ant-sized traffic slipping
beneath us? Surely you know its contrary motion                                    
is just an effect of aircraft velocity. Once, you learned terms                  
like aileron, stabilizer, winglet—an engineer’s vocabulary
lofting a city’s population every hour. Now, it’s remember

when to take your pill. Spin up those memories
of hand-hewn balsa gliders brightening
your mind with flight. The customary vocabulary,
ephemeral as hydrogen, burns like a blimp slipping
out of its fiery skin, forging terms
of an ashen equation devoid of forward motion. 

But any deviation to a body’s motion
is acceleration. Do you remember
the jarring medical jargon
that illuminated
your headlong slide
into senescence? Say the secret word

and win a hundred dollars. Every vocabulary
is ridden with holes—lose track
of a verb or adjective and forfeit your wings. To slip
out of that wizened skin, recollect
not owning a word for brightness
but knowing all manner of light. The term

for that? There’s no telling
how to parse a departed parlance
or the ringing tones bringing you to a lucid                                  
new horizon. I’ll help you make your move—
we lose nothing in the forgetting,
and relations are anyway saying a slip

of the tongue is enough for a trip                                      
to a single-room abode. So serve your term
sweetly. Be remembered
for a home-built lexicon,
internally animated
and bright

with vocabularies slipping
toward the infinite flight of words
brightly mindless, never remembered.

C. JOHN GRAHAM

C. John Graham’s poems have appeared in The Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Kestrel, and Blue Mesa Review, among other publications. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and, until retirement, worked at a particle accelerator facility. He’s now a search and rescue pilot and a part-time water gardener.