Dying Tongue
Dec 9 2010


The last one left
alive.
Old friends, buried,
brothers and sisters, passed away.

How the last speaker
of a dead language
must feel,
who has no one in the world to talk with
to criticize his grammar
or recall, for him
a forgotten word.

You begin to wonder
which memories are true
did the past really happen
when only you
remember.
Even your childhood no longer exists
when there’s no one left
who witnessed it.
And the man, impossibly young, in the pictures
could be anyone, at all.

The old man
stooped and grizzled
was always thus,
according to passers-by.
Who see him on the park bench
tossing bread at pigeons
drowsing in afternoon sun,
almost biting his tongue
when some reminiscence
startles him.

You always felt
you were an old soul
in a young body.
So perhaps it’s only just
you’ve finally caught up.
And now, the final custodian
of a long ago world
you’ll take to the grave.

All you have left is the past tense
the future imperfect
the passive voice.
Talking loudly
to yourself.
So that mothers with little children
warn them sternly
about strangers,
herd them quickly on by.



This poem is about how, without memory, we are nothing, we cease to exist, we lose meaning. And how memory has to be shared to be authentic. And how it’s only once we are forgotten, once there is no one to remember us, that we truly die.

It’s also about the loneliness of old age: how the world can move on, how you can feel like the last one left, how you can even question what's the point of going on. I’m really pleased with the analogy that is at the heart of the poem: how being the final custodian of shared memory is like being the last speaker of a dead language. So there is no one with whom to speak; and when you die, the language – and the world view that is inextricably part of it – might as well never have existed.

And finally, it’s about how we see old people as if they were born that way, were always thus. A silly conceit, of course, that ignores your own procession through life. And ignores how in the fullness of time, we are all contemporaries, all occupy the same continuum. And ignores how the child, the adolescent, the young adult remain alive in us, however old we become.