“Respair” by Craig van Rooyen

Every six minutes another word is dropped from the lexicon.

Who says there’s no use anymore for woolfell,
the skin of a sheep still attached to the fleece?

And when did we stop calling tomatoes love apples?
I need somewhere in the world for there still to be

a fishwife who understands the economy of flesh
grown taut under shimmer-skin laid out in open air.

Call me a sentimental fool, or better yet a mooncalf,
but I already miss the ten words that went extinct

in the last hour—before I learned their names
or tried to say something smart to make you love me.

Piepowder, drysalter, slugabed, forgotten
like the names of the enlisted in the army of Alexander the Great.

And where have they gone? Gathered on shrinking ice
with other victims of our inattention, floating out into a rising sea?

Like the last day my grandfather remembered my mother’s name.
So don’t mind me in the bathtub on my hands and knees

trying to keep my grandpa’s mind, a polar bear,
and the word poltroon from spinning down the drain.

It’s been left to me to save everything by remembering.
Before the cock crowed, Peter thrice denied Christ, and

twenty words marched off into the dark, never to be uttered again.
Fortunately, that night, we retained dumbass and forgiven,

two words it would be hard to live without these days.
And if I could, I’d turn myself inside out to resurrect

respair, that forgotten Emmaus Road word for
the return of hope after a long period of desolation.

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