Dylan Thomas’ teeth, crooked
as time-deepened gravestones,
lean over into each other,
sometimes touch at the top.
One thinks of his tilted
words, the sun-drowned
way they travel air. Gush
guttural tones of inflection,
sometimes inflict, sometimes
pull up sounds as deep as
a hauled net of grunting,
flopping fish from a singing sea.
The slipperiness of narrative
roving and reeling, un-spinning
tales with a vibrant currency,
a tongue untied with a tipsy truth.
I think of the sun-slow language
Bermudians speak, like making
a shade for a coherence, a non-
directed breeze blowing space.
The tongue, a hand digging
inside a purse to grab a verb,
noun to match the day, the heat
that makes a banana curl yellow.