Translations Maybe the Most Arduous of Berths to Attend to

Translations

maybe because they are the most

  arduous of berths to attend to,

in deciphering a tongue do you coax it

over the roof of your own mouth like a heavy stone?

Do you choose the texture and do you choose

the if it will conduct?  Do you then choose the current

and the voltage you ramp to pass through it?

and is your own breath the conduit of speaking?

Tell me,

isn't the first an act of listening a tip of your

head and ear toward mouths of strangers, supplicant.

Isn't it a courtship of clime and season, isn't

it reading of all that's barometric at the time, and spiritic, 

isn't  it a betrothal of treasuries, of lexicons and those

enunciations coaxed from the mute or not so much

mute 

as new to the music new to the thew new

to the movement of the jaw and the cheeks

how each squeeze receives the spleen

before releasing, breathing out all they'd held

in the cauldron or crucible (you choose

if you're listening) of their translations,

in the museums of the compilation of all

their worlds and it's then they know they have

the right word 

the one that's been misspoke

misheard understood, misused, mistranslated 

accidentally or purposely perverted all along,

when the audience en masse lift  their ears

up like something's being poured 

into the precious grail w

complete with handle ear

grips and allows the new translation

to be poured, a lost wax relief, and be

rebuilt reshaped renamed the way the poets

the way the Desert Fathers and Mothers

the way Avalokitesvara and her cask

of pure libations ease the beaten skin

of the dragons all the lost souls kick

in her direction until she's a pillar of dragons,

until she's the brief and eternal ear

and tongue of the masses, until calm

they come to search and take up their own

argot and waltz it to bed to do with it

what they will.