Hazards of Tongue and Heart

A Little Grammar is a Dangerous Thing
Diane Ackerman

Once life was all verbs –
discover, marvel, write, love, dare.

You inhabit a land of pronouns –
I, you, him, her, us, my, their.

Together we visit the past perfect’s
gentry – all the haves and have-nots;
endure the agitated conditional –
what if, could have been, if only, otherwise.

But the intense mood is where
I really specialise –
Do I employ or implore you?
And also the first-person transcendental –
Would that my spirit took wing.

A word-slut, I’ll tense anything
that dangles or can be modified,
spinning dreams of a future perfect,
until I suffer delusions of candour
and become a misplaced aberrant.

An idea in aspic is a word.

We could dissect that image
over lunch, were it not for a cardinal
rule of analytical grammar:
never end a sentence with a proposition.

So you’ll have to trust
that at the diner around the corner,
where the catch of the day is flu
and a poetic young waitress
rhymes her bell-like hips as she walks,
I’ve ordered you a double latte
and a double entendre to go.