"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. Read a review of Casting Off by Richard Swanson here. Order here to get your copy of Casting Off from Parallel Press. ISBN: 978-1-893311-90-9; paper $10.00 |