The Covenant

There is an oath beneath every sentence.

It enters the mouth with the breath,
hides itself inside grammar,
passes from one body to another
under the small disguise of speech.

A covenant older than lips.

One mouth reaching toward another,
asking to be received.

The mind gives this arrangement
its tidy names.

Cooperation.
Meaning.
Exchange.

The body knows another vocabulary.

Need.

The need to be touched
somewhere the hand cannot reach,
some interior surface
where longing has made its nest.

You have felt it.

That moment in conversation
when the air changes
and the ordinary machinery of speech
seems to hesitate.

A pause.

Everything tilts toward possibility.

Something has entered the room
and neither speaker has named it.

Say enough.

Say it carefully.

Say it with the skin left on.

We speak as though language
were built for information,
yet every sentence carries
the warmth of its maker.

We breathe ourselves
across the distance between us.

Even the lie requires intimacy.

The tongue must shape it,
the breath must warm it,
the mouth must lend it
a plausible architecture.

A falsehood still needs
some remembered contour of truth
to give it a body.

Honesty has its rhythm.

So does betrayal.

Each moves beneath language
like heat beneath a closed door,
something felt before it is understood.

And perhaps that is why
betrayal can sometimes be forgiven.

The wound remembers
the voice that made it.

Because the meaning of a sentence
lives partly in its delivery.

A glance held a fraction too long.

A word placed softly
where another word might have fallen.

A sentence lingering
before it reaches its period,
as though reluctant
to return to silence.

Desire enters language
through its smallest openings.

Tone.

Breath.

Inflection.

The minute hesitation
before a name.

We wrap meaning in these things
and send it outward,
past the vigilant machinery
of interpretation.

It lands somewhere deeper.

Between the ribs.

In the throat.

Behind the sternum,
where comprehension
and longing begin to resemble
the same sensation.

Speech becomes a kind of touching.

Each phrase approaches
what the body cannot reach.

Each question extends itself
toward an answer already trembling
inside the listener.

Each silence leaves room
for the other person to enter.

Perhaps this is what language has always been:

a truce between minds
that discovered,
with some terror,
how unbearable solitude becomes
when another voice
is almost close enough
to touch.