"On Speaking French After Twenty Years," from Casting Off. Appeared in Poetry Daily​, November 2007.

On Speaking French After Twenty Years

              For Massan
 
Strange, these words in my mouth--
the disappeared returned.
I am no longer agile,
but I offer them hamfistedly to you,
new to America from Mali,
your print skirt                                   
the cloth of my childhood in west Africa,
the tongue between us
the green summer
I spent in France feasting
on freedom and being
twenty-one.
 
Strange, what is still here
and what has been removed
to somewhere deeper.
Tomorrow and today are here
but yesterday is gone
as is the verb for missing.
Low is here, but high
has vanished.
 
It is as if, out in the desert, I had come
upon some vast, ruined city,
walls full of breaches:
disuse as damaging
as war.  The years it took
to lay that architecture
in the brain.
 
We’re talking of the newborns in our arms.
Blanks explode before me
without warning, silent fish-mouths open.                                                                
 
“Oh, mais ça c’est.........!”
I trail off, helplessly.
“Il est un peu........?”
You nod, smile, fill in the holes
where you can,

both of us fumbling to undo
what happened in that tower
in Babylon,
reaching as mothers
for that lost common tongue.
 

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