To Be Written in Another Tongue

To Be Written in Another Tongue

To Be Written in Another Tongue

As for example, the language in which my grandfather
dreams now he is dead, or living,
muttered in his sleep. Clouds

flow to a different breath, daylight moons hatch from the stillness
of a different dark,
where owls drop from the sun, dirt-coloured starlings

by other names than we know them gather
the dusk, grain by grain let fall the shadow of their bodies.
Such ordinary events

are poems in another tongue and no translation
possible. Owl
with its heavy blood and vowel an open mouth

too slow to snatch the heads off
dustmotes. Humming-birds
like Giotto’s tear-stained kamikaze angels

sorrow, having learned
their name in a dead language
is entrée to a steel-meshed aviary or Table of Contents,

some grey Jardin des Plantes. Grandfather mumbles
our names in the earth. We come
to light out of his mouth, oracular bubbles.

I range through the thesaurus
for a word: homesickness, yearning
of grandsons for a language

the dead still speak, the dying in their sleep still
mutter, the advent
of common objects, strange upon the tongue.