Talking about our feelings

It took time for feelings to enter language.

We began with sibilants, barks,

then pointing, so of course they did –

what is the ostensive for Schadenfreude?

 

Just as vocalizations migrate

toward the front of our shiftless mouths

from the back of our throat. In English,

we had wrã∂; Norse gave us angr.

 

But it takes time to receive a word

and make use of it: to even say I am angry

is still impossible for my father,

near though he is to his story’s end,

 

and were he to say it, it would be

but the first gusts in the anemometer’s alveoli

to the hurricane’s intricate pedesic fireworks,

not to mention their path back

 

to the spiracular exhalation

onto an anemone in Lhasa

from an Asian swallowtail.

But who am I to say?

 

I spend much of my life

monitoring what I am feeling

and I am no Sybil with my guesses.

It feels like catching wind

 

with your bare hands.

Sometimes people just click

their collection box closed

and say to themselves

 

mission accomplished –

but I have the suspicion

that we were handed keys

to a just-demolished castle.