“There’s been a hoot-owl howling by my window now
for six nights in a row.”
– “Wildfire” by Michael Martin Murphy
After awhile doesn’t any word take on the sound of its letters?
Not just swoop and buzz, but words with a kind of width, like fat
or the density in the letters of muscles?
Don’t the meanings just soak into the sponginess of it?
Words becoming their own ways by association.
I guess maybe just not as much as slick or slippery or slime
or hiccup or zoom or beep or moo.
Or the pressures of tick-tock.
Think of it as architecture or housework:
you can aerate any phrase with vowels
or introduce little tchotchkes and trinkets
with a clamor and a cacophony of consonants.
Alliteration is just this same furnitureal consonance;
it’s just the letters march out in front and meet you at the door
ferrying the sound of a souvenir or keepsake.
I can usually find fuel for my efforts in high-fidelity versification
in the curve of sound at the bay and port,
floating little noises so fluid it’s like water from a faraway place
lapping up your shore with one wave after another,
scrim across sand or the splash that abuts formidable bulwarks.
And really, much of life’s most succulent events are made of this
timing and musicality, scores you knit together by stitching time
with garlands of pretty, placed patter, a woosh and a bounce
before the last ripping roar.