Laurie Lamon

Your Beautiful Mouth

The sun is the sum of one particular age, the moon

the sum of abstinence, silver and fogged,

so now we will do without dictators, kidnappers, stories

of animals chewing off limbs or clubbed on the ice;

we will do without the scars of trees thirty feet tall

in Poland, Ukraine, where hands tore at saplings.

Now we will do without the history of one and no one.

We will do without the history of history.

But none of this has to do with your beautiful mouth

which now is a stone beneath waves, a struck

match, a view with a turnout and tables where animals

touch with tongues and paws the scent we leave

when we’ve had enough of wind and cold and lilies

the color of butter. You must know your mouth is a story

I cannot stop reading, or a sound of bells, or the sea

at the brink of the sea, little by little, coming of age.

Author: Laurie Lamon

Laurie Lamon is professor of English at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and she was the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship in 2007. Her collection, The Fork Without Hunger (CavanKerry), was published in 2005. Her second, Without Wings, was published  in the spring of 2009.

Plume: Issue #16 October 2012