Sometimes when I’m buying glue
at the hardware store or looking at books
in the library, someone will come and,
with so much love, invite me to dive with them
into the eddies of articulate grief. Or sometimes,
also with love, they’ll say something neutral, like,
“Nice weather,” and I’ll nod, though meanwhile
we wade in thick currents of all that goes unspoken.
Every day, I leave for a time the world of language.
I walk in the woods or along the red cliffs
where the only conversationalists
are the creek and the squirrel, the crow
and the magpie, the sharp scent of spruce,
and the burgeoning leaves.
I let myself speak only in listening.
The grief listens with me. Hours go by.
Words find us soon enough.
Posts Tagged ‘language’
Eight Months Later
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, language, nature, walk on April 22, 2022| 17 Comments »
Featured on Breakfast Poetry
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged interview, language, podcast on May 22, 2021| 2 Comments »
I LOVED this conversation with Anne Marie Vivienne on her podcast Breakfast Poetry, in which we talk about several of my favorite poems (St. Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell and In the Belly of the Whale by Dan Albergotti) and narrating our own lives, meeting what life brings to our door, and finding joy in the devotion of language. It’s available for your listening here:
Clean Slate
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, language, snow, weather on January 29, 2021| 2 Comments »
It’s almost always sunny just before
it snows—just before the sky turns grey
then meets the earth in giant swaths
of blue turned clouds turned snow turned drift,
and haven’t you sometimes wanted
to do that, too—to shift in an instant
from warm to cool, from blue to gray,
to know yourself as the opposite
of what you are, just as a day does,
an entirely new syntax unspooling
in swirling verbs and whirling predicates
so complex you forget who the subject is—
haven’t you wanted to flurry, to blizzard,
to white out until there were no tracks
like sentences left for you to follow?
January 1
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, death, grandmother, language, loss, new years on January 2, 2021| 3 Comments »
When I say Happy New Year,
I hear my grandmother’s voice
inside my voice, the way
she slapped the first syllable,
the way silence hung for a moment
before she finished the rest of the phrase.
HAP-py New Year!
Each time I say the words, she
is so alive in that moment—
the syllables themselves
wear her bright red nails,
her signature updo
and her rhinestone earrings.
HAP-py New Year!
I sing out again and again,
loving how she enters
each conversation this day.
There are small ways
to bring our beloveds back,
little rituals so strong they
defy the loss, so strong
that each time we do them
we become more and more
who we love. Her voice
becomes my voice and her
joy becomes my joy.
I don’t have to look in the mirror
to see she is here, her smile
my smile curving up from the inside.
Fluency
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged falling, language, love on December 27, 2020| 3 Comments »
Stepping off the edge
I began to learn falling
as I would learn to speak
another tongue—
confused at first,
disoriented,
but now the thrill
as I notice
how the new
airy syntax
and unbound grammar
have changed
everything
about the way I think,
everything
about the way
I love.
Resolution
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, language, plant, poem, poetry, speaking, tree on January 2, 2020| 4 Comments »
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
So let me speak this year in leaf,
and let me speak in stem.
Give me photosynthetic nouns
and algal interjections.
Let my syntax be made of phloem,
let my phonemes be blades of grass.
May all my conjunctions produce oxygen
may my prepositions be moss.
And let me mostly listen
with ears attuned to soil and root
And when I have words, let them be living,
may only the kindest words bear fruit.
From Pigs to the Dogs
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, pig, poem, poetry, sarcasm, science, tools on October 7, 2019| 2 Comments »
Priscilla the visayan warty pig
has learned to dig with a tool.
She digs with her nose, like all
other pigs, but then she’ll pick
up a stick or a scrap of bark
and use it to dig a hole.
It’s unprecedented—a pig
using a tool. And it gives me hope
that I, too, might evolve to acquire
something new—for instance,
an ability to understand sarcasm—
without which, studies say, I seem naïve.
Sarcasm, experts say, is most used
amongst people we love, despite the fact
that it comes from the Greek,
“to tear off flesh like dogs.”
Even a computer can comprehend
that sarcasm’s a tool for telling
true lies. So why am I so sincere?
Why does my right hemisphere not know
when “yeah, right” really means, “no way?”
Oh Priscilla, you inspiring visayan warty pig,
if you can evolve beyond your nature,
do you think perhaps I might? Yeah, right.
For more information about Priscilla and her science-tool-using prowess, visit https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/06/us/pigs-use-tools-study-scn-trnd/index.html
Translating my Father
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged father, language, love, poem, poetry on June 15, 2019| 5 Comments »
And when my dad said,
“You’ve gotta be shitting me,”
he meant, “I love you.”
And when he exclaimed,
“Christ on a bike,”
he meant, “I love you.”
And when he said,
“Turn off the TV,”
he meant, “Turn off the TV.”
And when he said,
“No,” I knew
he meant, “I love you.”
It was, in fact, easy
to translate, though sometimes
I didn’t like the native tongue.
But I felt that love in every word,
the love beyond syntax
love beyond lexicon,
love big enough to hold
us both for a lifetime
and then be passed on.
After a Friend Showed Me the Video About Koi No Yokan
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, koi no yokan, language, poem, poetry, spaces on January 26, 2019| 2 Comments »
with thanks to JT
all day leapfrogging
from known to known to known
missing the feelings between the feelings—
ten thousand mysterious spaces
waiting for us to fall in
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p05sn4xx/the-untranslatable-japanese-phrase-that-predicts-love
And Why Not Call It Miraculous?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, language, light, poem, poetry, transformation on June 17, 2018| 2 Comments »
Just as the sun enters the room
and changes the feel, the warmth,
and the power to perceive,
the right word, too,
can be a beam, can shine
into an evening, bring
glimmer, tidings of light,
make even the darkest corners
shine. Yes even one word
can become a prayer,
a gate we pass through
to find ourselves luminous.
Impossible to Wrap
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged adagio for strings, ars poetica, Christmas, gift, giving, language, poem, poetry on December 26, 2017| 6 Comments »
I want to give you words,
as if they might do what
the body can’t do—
as if with verb I could
meet the place in you
that most wants to be touched,
as if with noun I could
know the parts of you
that most want to be known.
I want to give you
the most faithful adjective,
the one that cradles you
before you even realize
that you need to be held—
once I heard a song
written by a man
for another man, a song
that swelled, then took
two steps back,
then swelled again, then
took two steps back
before finally rising
to an unsteady ledge
and my heart
beat outside of my body
and my eyes wept
with tears that were mine and not mine,
and I want to give you words
that will find every ache in you
that longs to be soothed,
words that will seek out
each lonely place, that will find
every branch of you—
not like a wind
that is here and gone, no, more like
the bark that gives everything
to protect you,
the bark that grows as you grow
and takes its shape from you.
Studying Spanish with My Son
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged adjectives, happiness, language, poem, poetry on December 20, 2017| Leave a Comment »
We begin with simple words.
Fat. Ugly. Good. Tall.
Gordo. Feo. Bueno. Alto.
How odd to break the world
into adjectives—
how human this longing
to describe a thing,
as if to explain it is to know it.
Easy. Big. Blonde.
Facil. Grande. Rubio.
I imagine a language
where instead of delineating
how different we are,
it had only shades of sameness.
Would we still find ways
to fight? To judge? To grade
and order and assess?
What if it were only ever a day—
not a good day, not a bad day,
just a day. And the woman—
not a fat woman, not a blonde woman,
just a woman—moved through that day
and met a man. Would they
be happier if they didn’t live
happily ever after, if they just lived,
their hearts not even knowing
you could fill in all that lovely silence
with adjectives and adverbs—
it would rain sometimes.
And the flowers would bloom.
Dinner would be served.
They would look in the mirror and smile.
Nocturne
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, night, poem, poetry on September 12, 2016| 1 Comment »
Even after everything is said
there is so much left unsaid.
I have measured the nights in stars
and lost track. I struggle to say
something true. When I stop
trying, I notice the how night
comes in and fills my throat.
Though no one can hear it,
it says everything I wish to say.
Speaking of Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, love, poem, poetry on July 26, 2016| 2 Comments »
At the headwaters, the river
is mercilessly clear. Every rock
on the bottom is visible, magnified.
The fish must find shadows
or roots for hiding. I wonder
how it would be to speak so clearly—
a tongue so transparent
we might gaze into each other’s words
and see every color,
even the colors we would hide.
I want that, I say. A gray bird
sings in the spruce tree.
I cannot translate its song,
though it’s only several repeated notes.
This is how it is, sometimes,
even the simplest utterances
are impossible to decipher.
And now thunder. This language
arrives with its charge, its dark verb.
I tell myself I don’t want it.
Then it becomes my greatness.
Foreign Tongues
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, mothering, poem, poetry on May 24, 2016| 7 Comments »
We sometimes slip into w-wanguage,
a tongue my son invented, though no longer speaks.
My daughter and I are the two sole speakers
and we often find ourselves saying
What wa wabulous way, or
Womma, wan wi wease wave wore wapples?
The rules are simple.
We break them anyway,
forgetting to w or tripping over
our own expectations of how a word should sound.
In the end, the desire to speak clearly
and to be understood always wins.
Other times we’ll speak in nonsense syllables,
long strings of babble bellowed or crooned.
We’ll wave our hands, as if there is something
really at stake—like the desire to be understood.
Perhaps this is why whatever syllables
she utters, I will eventually echo them back,
stroking her hair, looking her right in the eye,
letting her know for certain
I know exactly what she means.
A Languaging Between
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, love, poem, poetry, spring on April 18, 2016| 4 Comments »
Spring speaks a language
with only present progressive verbs—
just today as I walked into blue sky
turned blizzard, I attempted translations
into English with words such as flusterizing,
mirthing, tizzying, and unguarding,
but none of these seemed quite right.
As soon as I felt I had touched
something true, the moment
was already changed.
In Springese, there’s a word
that means both destroying
and flourishing. And another word
that means both grieving
and rejoicing. I felt my heart
leap up in glad recognition—so familiar
it is with unrepentant paradox
that the clumsy tongue can’t master.
They seemed to have a profound conversation,
my heart and spring, that my brain wanted
so much to decode. It could not,
but the snow was heavy and cold and wet
as it fell on my warming cheeks,
my rising chest, the greening grass.
And though it was clearly
inadequate, the brain settled
for this gloss, God, its so good,
so damned good to be alive.
Walking Home from School with my Daughter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, parenting, poem, poetry on September 5, 2014| 1 Comment »
She speaks in a secret language.
It is always made up on the spot.
She will look at me most sincerely
and say something she knows I’ll not
understand. But what pleasure when
I do. This time, she wants raspberries,
please. And I offer them. And then,
in plain English, she asks me,
surprised and slightly thrilled,
Mom, how’d you know what I mean?
And I respond in the secret language
only eyes can speak.
Or Say Nothing at All
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, mahogany, poem, poetry on July 30, 2014| 1 Comment »
Teach me, world, to speak
in mahogany—to begin
every word with a hum
and deliver each word
with a laugh and end every word
with the trust
that if it wanted to
the word could go on
forever.
Translation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bridge, language, love, poem, poetry on June 13, 2014| 2 Comments »
I whisper them in your ear before we sleep.
I say them because what I am trying to say
is that if you were on one side of the river and I
were on the other side, then I, although I
am an engineering dunce, would find a way
to build a bridge to you. And if the bridge fell apart,
then although I am a klutz, I would walk far upstream
and try to swim across the current, no matter how cold,
how murky. And if the water were too swift and it carried
me past you, well then, I would climb out and dry off
and recover and try again. And if by chance we found
ourselves on the same side of the river and it
was both marvelous and terribly hard, and
if I sometimes found myself wanting to build
a bridge to cross and get away, or found myself
wanting to just jump into the waves, well,
I wouldn’t. I would stay. But that is a whole lot to say
and not so easy to take in, so instead, for the sake
of simplicity and going to sleep, I just kiss you on the head
and whisper those three words.
Uprising
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, language, love, poem, poetry, silence on March 23, 2014| 9 Comments »
Speak to me soft
in a voice so low that I lean in,
and speak to me in idioms
of night. Let’s lose any lens
that condemns. Let’s forget
any tongues that speak in
blades or claws. Speak awe.
Speak yes. Speak song. Translate
my fear into tenderness.
Converse in amber.
Converse in ice melt clear.
Speak quietly. Speak near
in tones that I more feel
than hear. Speak broken.
Speak wing. Let’s mislay our will
to judge. Let us be uncaged, untethered,
let us be light, fluent in warmth
in greening, in spring. And let
us be lighter than that. And lighter.
Speak in nothing. In the morning,
let’s give everything away.