Idiomatic

April 11 2016

Sometimes, a word makes me stumble.

Slipping into the blank space,

tumbling over the edge

of line breaks,

getting stuck in the pause.

If it were a song

you’d be straining to hear.

As the restraint

in a powerful voice

goes unfulfilled.

As you anticipate

and tension builds.

As the note lingers, decays

becomes sweeter still.

The mother tongue

whispering words in my ear.

The pregnant pause

where I’m shocked to hear

how odd they sound.

We are all translators

of the foreign language

we speak from the heart.

The lost lingos

arcane dialects

neglected patois,

the inner voice

we’d never chance to talk.

The likes, ya knows, blah-blahs.

Sentences

that run on, and on.

The whiplash bone-rattling stops.

This poem began in a very different place than it ended up. I was reading about a poet who writes in English, but whose mother tongue was German:  how she hears language differently -- the odd literalisms that strike her, the acute attention she brings.

I liked this idea of translation:  that everything is mediated, indirect, never entirely clear.

Language is our most precise tool of thought and communication. Yet it is, at best, an approximation.