A remembrance of Leslie
You used the word utterance and I didn’t know how to feel. I never could figure out why words have that effect on me. It’s more than to say or speak. A noun—the content, etc. It is a religious term, utterance (thus, sayeth the lord). You were a religious person then. A theology student. The earth begins as a poem, you said, the world, no—the universe—or every last wasted piece of fecund land. Each barren womb and speck of ash inscribed with its very own map of hell. The Book of Genesis is the sperm, the protozoa. Utterance reminds me of a calf not just speaking but taking its milk so that it may mewl and live to see the sky turn to dust. You say utterance is when word becomes law, is held or holds itself in the air like an accident of heaven. A truth punctured with a knife, severed as an eye is from its vision.
BRYAN D. PRICE is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Glacier, Dialogist, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.