The German Tail (Schwanze)

Lyrics

The lamp is low. The ink smells of metal and dust.
The book is open on the desk.
Page one thousand, four hundred and twelve.
The word is Schwanz.
In Old High German, swanz.
Just a tail.
The flick of a fox disappearing into the woods.
The curl of a cat's question mark.
A clean line, a simple appendage.
The part that follows.
But the mind makes a quiet leap.
A metonymic substitution.
A euphemism built not for politeness, but for speed.
The brain builds a little bridge of shame, or convenience.
And a word for the thing that hangs behind an animal...
...becomes the word for the thing that hangs before a man.
Here, in Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch,
started in 1854,
you can feel the paper thinning under your thumb.
You can trace the divergence.
The primary definition, clean as bone.
And then the annotation, in a later hand:
Umgangssprache. The language of the street.
A second shadow attached to the first word.
The mind makes its quiet leap.
A metonymic substitution.
A euphemism built not for politeness, but for speed.
The brain builds a little bridge of shame, or convenience.
And a word for the thing that hangs behind an animal...
...becomes the word for the thing that hangs before a man.
The records don't say who said it first.
Some soldier in a barracks in Prussia.
Some drunk in a tavern in Munich.
Their voices are gone. The word remains.
And in Swabia, a farmer can still speak of a bird's tail...
and mean only that.
A linguistic ghost, a pocket of the past,
where the bridge was never built.
I close the book. The leather sighs.
The lamp flame shivers.
One word. Two meanings.
One clean, one borrowed.
The tail... and the tail.