What a Person Is

These two are you,
the label that is you and its referent
like apple and what it stands for,
its consonants and vowels aiming
to cram essence into fact
but miss the tightness of the skin
before surrendering to tooth,
the sweet flesh, the ping in the air
beneath the nose, the punctuation
of seeds as tongue and bite
circumlocute to center.

You are so much more than name
and occupation, marital status, and yearly income,
all words spilled like coffee grounds
on the counter of your days that turns you
into a measly datum excelling in surface
to scrawl across a spreadsheet.

But you, brought up from the root cellar of time
to dwell in that bowlful of harvest we share,
you are a sweetness in manner, a tartness
in sorrow, so full of flavor,
an open-ended richness like the exhalation
of mystery that escapes when you pierce
the skin of an O or an A,
liberating the breathing hidden in a word,
as together we swallow to our core
the hushed longing that lives there
with its seeds of unsayable truth.

-Kitty Yanson