The Stuttering Cures

One thing we learn: how much poison

The body can take. Alcohol,

For instance. Cruelty. Prayer as duty.

Once a day Ronnie Muller read

History aloud because Mrs. Cook

Demanded a paragraph

Of recitation. Stuttering's cure,

Perhaps, though Ronnie Muller,

Force-fed like a protest faster,

Never finished a sentence

Before P or T swallowed

His breath and the carburetor

In his throat stalled for good.

And always, there's worse, some surgeon

A hundred years before Mrs. Cook

Who snipped portions of stutterers' tongues,

Clipped strategic bits and pieces

Like speech therapy's barber.

All of those stories of stutterers

Who can sing, who can whisper,

Who can perfectly speak in unison

Or when they cannot hear themselves:

Each one of those patients, after

The plastic surgery for speech,

Waited for that doctor to unwrap

His transformed tongue, to say "Yes, now"

As welcome. Think of that first

Tentative stutter, the patient

Hearing imperfection's nuance,

The misery of misdirected breath

Lengthening to the wish for

The speechless life of stone.

So easily, the wind we've stored

Scatters the memos of our thinking.

The man who sold me insurance

Lost his tongue to cancer, entered

The enormous stammer of silence,

The messages on his note pad

Thinning to yes and no, to tapping,

At last, on the empty tablet,

Nothing anyone could decipher,

As if it were personal code

Or all of his thoughts now stuttered.