There’s a word, I love,
I heard & said & said,
days ago, that now
cannot remember.
The sense of it remains somehow
rounded round the palette,
sound still on the tongue,
but now unutterable, almost impalpable.
This is what memory is like.
The taste of a certain moment
sticks in the throat.
Another settles in a cavity
that years have slowly eaten away.
We savor the familiar,
long for the sweet trigger
from an earlier life,
some unrecoverable trace.
The word does not satisfy this.
Note: I think the second half needs another stanza. I worked on some ideas but cut them for balance. Any suggestions? I had been thinking about this poem (the word on the tip of the tongue) for weeks. Listening to Calvin Forbes read "Momma Said" on The Poetry Magazine Podcast helped me get this draft written. Thanks to Don Share and Christian Wiman; they may not publish my poems but sometimes they help make them.)
